Cornell has entered into an agreement with Ruckus Network Inc. to provide students with better access to the company's music and video download service.

The ad-supported, college-targeted service is available to any student, anywhere, with a valid student e-mail address (an address ending in edu). Cornell's agreement with the company will establish a Ruckus server on campus. "There will be a huge difference in speed," said Chris Lawson, director of corporate development at Ruckus. "An album that would otherwise take a minute or two will download in a couple of seconds." The university also will save on network bandwidth costs, he added, since users will be downloading across the campus network rather than across the Internet.

Music subscription is free to students; faculty, staff and alumni can receive the service for an $8.99 monthly fee. Ruckus says its library includes more than 3 million songs from all major international record labels and thousands of independent labels and artists. The downloads are guaranteed by the company to be free of spyware and other viruses sometimes found in files from peer-to-peer sharing networks. The company says it has subscribers at 1,000-plus college campuses nationwide and has more than 173 official college and university partnerships like the one with Cornell.

The service includes social networking features and an interface to Facebook that will allow users to share playlists and reviews. A gaming channel has just been added.

University officials hope the service will discourage students from engaging in illegal downloads and incurring lawsuits for copyright infringement.

"Having a music service on campus one would hope mitigates the amount of illegal downloading that happens," said Kent Hubbell, the Robert W. and Elizabeth C. Staley Dean of Students. "We talked to some students over the summer and got a positive reaction, summed up by, 'What's wrong with free?'"

For two years the university subscribed to the fee-supported Napster music service, making it available free to students with costs supported by anonymous corporate donors. After the donations ran out, the Student Assembly decided not to continue to purchase the service with student activity funds. The Ruckus service is supported by advertising on its download pages and "pre-roll" ads on video files. The only cost to the university is to provide space in its server farm for the Ruckus server.

Music from Ruckus is subject to Microsoft's digital rights management (DRM) system. The music can be played on a computer or -- with an additional $20 per semester fee -- downloaded to a Microsoft-compatible mp3 player, but it cannot be traded or burned to a CD. A user must renew a "license" to use a track every 30 days; the company likens this to borrowing a book from the library. As with Napster, the service does not work with Mac OS or Linux computers or iPods, none of which support Microsoft's DRM system. It will run on Intel Macs or older Macs with Windows emulators. "We also make songs available for purchase," Lawson said, adding, "We know that the iPod is the dominant market player and we're working to be compatible."

Videos available include a large collection of music videos, feature films from independent filmmakers and student films. The company is negotiating to obtain feature films from major studios. "Film studios are still behind the record industry in terms of licensing new content. The record labels provide Ruckus with new albums the same day they are in the record stores. The film studios take much longer," Lawson said.

As soon as the campus server has been tested, the service will be formally announced by a mass e-mailing to students, Hubbell said.