MIT's New Music Sharing Network

tessaiga writes "The New York Times has an article about a new project at MIT to replace music file sharing over P2P with sharing over cable TV (reg free link). The Library Access To Music Project relies on the more relaxed copyright restrictions on analog transmission formats like cable. From the article: "M.I.T. students, faculty and staff can choose from 16 channels of music and can schedule 80-minute blocks of time to control a channel. The high-tech D.J. can select, rewind or fast-forward the songs via an Internet-based control panel. Mr. Winstein and Mr. Mandel created the collection of CD's after polling students." The article goes on to point out that this is (hopefully) legal under current laws because MIT already has a blanket license to broadcast music over analog media, and recording songs played over this system "would be no different from recording songs from conventional FM broadcasts"."

boston.com link: no reg req

[paiute]

boston.com [boston.com]

Analogue vs Digital

[rbbs]

Would they not have a license problem as they can control the program by rewind and fast forward. In an analogue medium the flow is linear - this way, people can control the order of the music which probably means their analogue license won't cover it...

(In the uk at least, if you wish to broadcast music, there are controls on how many tracks from one album / label etc you can broadcast in a set period of time. )

great idea if it's legal though.

Re:Microsoft Funded

[maan]

BUT...they run it on linux! Check out http://lamp.mit.edu/lamp-aup.pdf where they detail the setup and mention that it runs on linux.

Maan

Good Luck.. Risky venture

[nurb432]

Part of the legal power that is being exerted is the very fact that its NOT analog signals..

The DMCA power that is being tossed around as a large stick applies only to digital format.

Since they are moving the audio do digital format, they potentially are asking for trouble.

Plus AFAIK a license to broadcast analog doesn't automatically give you a license to broadcast digital ( it makes sense that you should be able too, but when does law have to make sense? )

Re:That's all nice and well

[proj_2501]

I think that's more of a restriction made by the station management. I break all of those rules. Of course, I'm on college radio, so I don't have to run my playlists past Clear Channel ahead of time like most commercial stations do.

Similar to the streaming fees?

[Davak]

"Streaming fees" to me always reminded me of "steaming feces." Anyway, I wonder if MIT will be caught by some of the other legal challenges to the analog hole.

Anybody remember this?

Third U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia has upheld Copyright Office's earlier decision that traditional radio stations have to pay royalties for streaming their traditional radio broadcasts over the Net (process is called simulcasting).

Historically, American radio stations have had weird exception from royalties -- they don't have to pay anything for artists or record labels (they pay for songwriters though) for playing their music on radio, unlike most other radio stations in the world. And to complicate this issue, American Net radio stations have to pay such royalties. Now, the court fight was about this exemption rule and about applying it to simulcasting. Radio stations argued that their material that they air through radio-waves, is exempt from royalties even if broadcasted over the Net. This obviously puts smaller, Net-only broadcasters in losing side as they need to cough up to RIAA every time they play music on their station, while benemoths such as Clear Channel (world's largest radio station owner) don't have such costs involved.

"The DMCA's silence on AM/FM webcasting gives us no affirmative grounds to believe that Congress intended to expand the protections contemplated," the Philadelphia appeals decision reads. "The exemptions the (DMCA) afforded to radio broadcasters were specifically intended to protect only traditional radio broadcasting, and did not contemplate protecting AM/FM webcasting."

Re:Way to go. Not.

[ckd]

Am I the only one who thinks that, at this very moment, a RIAA lawyer will be drafting notes that use your comment as the centrepiece for a legal motion to get this MIT project shut down?

This is not some random student project. MIT has intellectual property lawyers.

innovative legitimate music-buying options

Music need not be purchased to be heard. MIT has paid ASCAP et al for blanket transmission licenses, like radio stations use. (BTW, the campus radio station, WMBR, used to be called the "Tech Broadcasting System" or WTBS, until some guy in Atlanta bought the call letters from them...now it stands for Walker Memorial Basement Radio, for its location.)

See their FAQ [mit.edu], particularly the questions "Is this really legal? How?" and "Did you have lawyers look at this?"

Re:Won't last long

[Anonymous Coward]

>Um, MP3s are definitely not a perfect digital copy.

I've always wondered why that point was never put in front on trials. If people were to actually share CD-dumps (in ISO, WAV, FLAC or whatever format) then yes it would be a perfect digital copy of the original CD.

But MP3 files (or OGG, AAC, etc) are lossy CODECs, and as such the quality is lower than the original, just like a FM transmission or a CD-to-tape recording.