Tom Gorman, Kansas University junior, is among several students who use Ruckus, an online service that offers free music downloads to anyone with a dot-edu e-mail address.

A tank of gas is a treasure to me, I know now that nothing is free.

The guys of Blink 182 penned those words for their song, “Carousel,” in 1994, and 13 years later that very song is available for free to anyone with a dot-edu e-mail address.

Ruckus, an advertisement-supported provider of digital music downloads, allows any college student to register on its Web site and download music for free from its catalog of more than 2 million songs. Hundreds of thousands of students are registered with the site, according to a company spokesman, and a few of them attend Kansas University.

Tom Gorman, a KU student from Rossville, heard of Ruckus when it was still limited to universities that paid a fee and agreed to host its servers. KU never took part in this program, and Gorman could only join the network once it changed its approach in late January.

“It’s pretty good. The good thing is its free, but it’s got DRM up the wazoo,” Gorman said.

DRM, or digital rights management, is the source of the biggest complaints leveled at the Web site. Because Ruckus chose to use Windows DRM, spokesman Chris Lawson said, songs downloaded can only be played on computers that have Windows Media Player. Most Macintosh computers don’t support Windows Media Player.

Erin Hirt, a KU student studying abroad in Europe, ran into this problem recently when she purchased a Mac computer. She’d downloaded music to her PC but couldn’t play it from her new computer.

The site has proven popular with those who use it, but it’s still tiny in comparison to digital music industry-leading iTunes. Lawson declined to discuss how long it would take for his company to become profitable.

Eric Garland, the CEO of BigChampagne, a California-based company that analyzes the use of popular entertainment online, said the question that remains to be seen about Ruckus – and other services that provide digital music downloading – is how it implements its plan.

“The devil is in the details. There’s nothing spectacular about the iTunes music store,” Garland said. “The product will determine whether companies like Ruckus are successful.”

The other complaint arising from the use of DRM is the songs can’t easily be played on portable music players, like the popular iPod, though at least one KU user said he’d been able to download a program on the Internet that allowed him to strip off the DRM “wrapper” and use the song more freely.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act makes this activity illegal, but it is difficult to enforce.

In addition to providing free music to college students, Ruckus also allows users to download movies and TV shows for a fee. Faculty and alumni of universities, who are separated from students based on their response to a registration question, also can download for a fee.

In the past year, what had been stratospheric growth in online music has slowed, Garland said, which some perceive to mean there is limited potential for growth. Garland disputes that notion.

“There are few markets that offer such opportunities. This is only the beginning,” he said.