Ruckus to Allow Students to Legally Share Music; Becomes First Campus Entertainment Network to Support Legal Music Sharing

Ruckus to Allow Students to Legally Share Music; Becomes First Campus Entertainment Network to Support Legal Music Sharing: "'Ruckus is excited to offer legal music sharing, an improvement to the traditional P2P experience for students,' said William Raduchel, Chairman and CEO of Ruckus. 'The application enables users to find and download virus free tracks from Ruckus on their friends' and classmates' computers at incredible speeds. What we're really doing is allowing students to find friends through media, and media through friends, using Ruckus' powerful social media application. The Ruckus music sharing application also protects students from legal liability.' "

Ah, the beauty of marketing spin.... sure, Ruckus wants to use P2P as a distribution method because it's going to lower their bandwidth costs incurred by having to serve up all the content from their head-end. But, why would a consumer care that they can download a song directly from their friend as oppossed to directly from the Ruckus servers? In a scenario where both users are subscribers to an all-you-can eat music service, then they can "share" all they want just with published/public playlists, queues and listening history that link back to the source content on the host.

As I always provide as a disclaimer.... "I may be missing something", but I don't get how this is anything more than a PR person's take on how to generate some P2P-related press coverage after the Grokster ruling.