Universities and colleges are making a lame attempt at convincing their students to stop filesharing and to use Ruckus instead. Ruckus is a service that provides DRM-filled music downloads. This move is undoubtedly encouraged by the RIAA who have been placing increasing pressure on the institutions to stop their students using the facilities available to share massive numbers of files with their friends.

But Ruckus isn’t a viable swap for filesharing apps like Ares: it’s simply not comparable. Whereas filesharing means you actually share files with your friends – and not just music downloads, either – the proposed alternative Ruckus only provides you with a DRM-protected music file. No sharing involved there at all.

Filesharing is popular. Big business and the RIAA say that it needs to be stopped to protect the artists (what they mean is to protect their stockholders). The encouragement of Ruckus is not the way to approach this particular problem.