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"."

That's all nice and well

[Sadiq]

It's all nice and well till the technology takes off and soon they'll find the nice hole in the licensing that allows them to do it gets shut off.

Maybe i'm just cynical.

we all know how lawmaking in the US works, right?

[wouterke]

it's not because this is legal right now, that it will remain legal until the end of times.

If this becomes popular, my bet is that the RIAA will buy themselves a law which will outlaw this. If it indeed is legal right now, that is...

Way to go. Not.

[WIAKywbfatw]

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?

The way to combat RIAA, etc isn't by shouting from the rooftops that you'll pirate/whatever you want to call it their music from now till doomsday. The way to combat them is by supporting non-RIAA artists, by supporting innovative legitimate music-buying options such as the Apple iTunes store, by buying second-hand CDs, etc.

Giving someone the very ammunition that they need to shoot you down is suicide. Perhaps when you graduate to the real world you'll learn that lesson.

Re:That's all nice and well

[rknop]

however if you talk FM, cable, Airwave where the Blasphemous word does not appear, they seem to be pretty okay with it.

They are??? Haven't you heard the words "analog hole?"

Mind you, that's not the kind of "hole" that comes to mind when I think about the **AA....

-Rob

Won't last long

[paiute]

The loophole is that the data is converted from D to A? How hard is it to capture it back to digital? (and wait for the RIAA stormtroopers to knock on the door?)

Analog file sharing.

[yoder]

One step forward and two steps back. All in the name of progress and innovation. Instead of using the technology we have now and improving upon that, we have to go back and use previous technologies to bypass roadblocks set up by the multimedia mafiosi. Oh well, hope this pans out.

It won't stay free for long.

[Charcharodon]

They will still have to pay royalties on it, much in the way radio stations and web casters do. Remember the big fight last year over this? I'm sure they will try to argue that it is actually a webcast reguardless of the fact if it is analog or digital. Once they do that then they will have to pay per song played and that will stop it dead in it's tracks. If they do manage to convince the authorities it's more like on demand cable I'm sure their is or soon will be reg's that mandate royalties as well. Private networks are the way to swap music, throw a lan party, set up a wireless, or even run cable down the hall. When all else fails get yourself a portable or a hand full of DVD-RW's/CD-RW's and walk it over to a friends house. There are plenty of ways of sharing data that RIAA can't track/stop.

stealing or a thesis?

[rudabager]

What is stopping the students on campus from contributing their "CD's" in mp3 form to LAMP? If they could do this and bump up the channels then this would be exactly the same as p2p file sharing, the only difference is that its analog and the "offending" files arent on your computer. These students are doing the exact same thing as all the people the RIAA calls "theifs," only MIT is doing it in analog. Its stealing in digital but it's a PHD thesis in analog. How stupid are these laws?

Already in place, silly.

[AndyRooney]

Hi, have you been to college? Many, many, many colleges around the US that are too small to afford an FCC license and/or transmission equipment for a radio station broadcast over cable today. They have all the media in one place, you schedule blocks to DJ with training for the equipment, and users turn on their TV to listen. MIT *already has* pays royalties to do this. The absolute only thing different between this and a small college station is that they've automated the process so that you can do it from home, and thus don't need training for the board. Seriously, this isn't something that the RIAA doesn't know about, it's just a "Hm, cool." addition to an existing, approved system.

Yes, way to go.

[leomekenkamp]

According to your (Score:4, Insightful), no, you are not the only one, but you are incorrect anyway ;-). What if we were talking about FM radio here?

Reread the original post with FM radio in mind, and then tell me the RIAA will have lawyers drafting notes to have all FM radio stations shutdown because of the comments of people that say they are recording songs from FM...

Re:Good Luck.. Risky venture

[jareds]

What the hell are you rambling about?

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

LAMP broadcasts analog signals over cable, as permitted by MIT's licenses with ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC.

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

That's backwards. Audio from CD's, which are digital, is being broadcast as analog, just like any radio station does.

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? )

The audio is not being broadcast digitally.

Why you people just dont get it.

[mumblestheclown]

Whoever came up with this idea is clever. But, he/she similarly totally misunderstands the point of copyright laws by playing "bright lining" games (as do, in my experience, many slashdot readers).

(the term "bright lining" means doing some activity with a full knowledge of where the law or regulation is and doing something right up to this regulation, this living up to the letter of the law, though, the implication is, not the spirit.)

Copyright is a socially constructed concept. Basically, copyrightholders are entitled to a monopoly of sorts for a limited time on their work. most people agree that the primary reason for this is to encourage more creation of works.

When people talk in terms of "it's legally okay to copy a song from the radio" or "it's legally okay to copy three pages, but not the whole book", then they are basically referring to PRAGMATIC copyright interpreations and rulings based on past technological and social circumstance. as technology and social circumstance change, it may become necessary to change (usually tighten) what is allowed in order to best preserve the spirit and intention of copyright, which, again, is to encourage authors.

here's a really obvious sign of when the spirit of copyright is broken--i call it the "extrapolation" argument. basically, somebody takes an existing interpretation and tries to "scale it up":

• sharing music with your kid sister is ok, so sharing music with everybody's kid sister is (Napster)
• photocopying one page is ok, so let's set up a distributed system via amazon's new full-text thing by which everybody downloads one page and somehow they are combined again (slashdot/amazon)
• MIT has a blanket license for analog music / copying music from existing analog sources of music is ok (radio - unscheduled recordings, includes ads, not complete songs), so let's play a clever trick by which people can get whatever they want in a high quality, but analog format (MIT)

All three of these will work, in the short term. And all three will generate stricter interpretations and a clamp-down, because they are so clearly against the spirit of the socially beneficial copyright law (oh, shut up already, completely-anti-copyright anarcho-libertarians - go and do a little historical research about every attempt to do away with copyrights and patents completely). The end result of this will be stricted interpretations and more bitching and whining on slashdot. What is the root cause of this? The evil RIAA and MPAA? Yes, they occasionally go overboard (the mickey mouse extension act is pretty egregious), but generally they are in the right.

The root cause is those who think that they're being clever by bright-lining copyright interpretations without realizing that they are interpretations that are subject to reasonable modification as circumstances warrant, not god-given cast-in-stone truths. or, in other words, more technological sense than social understanding.

Disagree? reply, not mod down.

I'm still at a loss

[CAIMLAS]

I'm still at a loss - how is lossy analog via FM radio or television still any different than lossy digital music, such as MP3s? Is it simply an issue of availability that makes MP3s so detestable by the MPAA?

Re:Way to go. Not.

[stubear]

Excuse me "Mr. +4 Interesting" but the Apple iTunes store is populated with thousands of artists and songs whose record labels are part of the RIAA. The iTunes store also works with the RIAA to ensure the music is delivered in a way so as to limit widespread illegal distribution of the songs downloaded from the service. iTunes is as much an experiment for Apple as it is for the RIAA.

Re:Yes, way to go.

[slimak]

don't forget...

5. playing high quality music

Different from FM

[Anonymous Coward]

The high-tech D.J. can select, rewind or fast-forward the songs via an Internet-based control panel.

This is precisely how it is different from an FM broadcast. This is the provision that the copyright lawyers will go after.

Re:Microsoft Funded

[kaiidth]

Microsoft are funding a bunch of campus style software and such. iCampus [mit.edu]is one example of this, a large MIT research thingy, which covers funding for all sorts of projects (I seem to recall there being, for example, a student shuttle-bus which reports its location via gps to the web...). It's actually fairly fragmented; like most large lumps of university money it has been taken up by people as and when rather than as part of a Grand Plan.

Well, no matter how it appears, certainly if you ask MS or MIT they will tell you there is a grand plan - for sure. But relax, Microsoft have been throwing funding at universities for 'wired campus' style projects on a regular basis as far as I know, and as yet it has met with limited success from their perspective. They would love to own the education market, of course. They just haven't got a decent grip on it yet, and not for lack of trying.

You have to realise that research and industrial funding is an uneasy alliance at best. Good researchers attract funding whilst controlling the conditions under which it is given; bad researchers accept funding that comes with strings. In this case, MIT are, I suspect, in the driver's seat. This makes them relatively unusual; many researchers are rather naive and, on receipt of a few flattering comments and hints of 'long term collaborations', 'special relationships' or similar, will immediately go for it no matter what the conditions. Some even believe that they are the ones doing the 'using'. Having worked for one of these types, I can assure you that these researchers are wrong (do I sound disillusioned? Oh well).

It's worth keeping your eyes open, anyway; if you see anything using tablet PCs, MS DRM, heavy use of .NET, and 'Learning through [demonstration/play]' with [insert microsoft technologies], then you can more or less assume that the researcher is a Microsoft prostitute of some kind. But this particular project seems too 'free' to be particularly blessed by MS.

Don't know if that helps.

Re:That's all nice and well

[jandrese]

Ah, it appears that I was misinformed. I guess these are merely corporate radio limitations, not anything mandated by the song licensing agencies.

Re:Why you people just dont get it.

[stewwy]

An important point overlooked often is that for a law to be effective it must be be supported by a large majority of the population, at least in a democracy. It must also be seen to be fair. The copyright laws have been seen as unfair since the Disney case, when it became obvious that copyright was no longer a limited time monopoly, as you quote. But became effectivly a monopoly for all time, thus depriving the general population of a right they previously enjoyed and leading to the general contempt in which these laws are now held. The law of unintended consequences is the only law thats always held true!

Re:Why you people just dont get it.

[thatguywhoiam]

I think you have the right idea, regarding your comments about the spirit of copyright.. but look at this particular comment from the article, I think it sheds some light:

"It's almost an act of performance art," Mr. Zittrain said. Mr. Winstein, he said, has "arrayed the gerbils under the hood so it appears to meet the statutory requirement" - and has shown how badly the system of copyright needs sensible revamping.

My interpretation of this is that the system the MIT guys have developed is supposed to demonstrate that you can build a feasible, centralized, (somewhat) random-access music distribution system within the framework of existing law. You can do this using technical slight-of-hand and the particular legal circumstances regarding analog transmissions.

When people realize that you can have this almost-Napster legally, which provides a similar service, the point is to realize that the new laws are broken. There's a huge distinction, technically, between a P2P network and this project... however to an end-user the effect is much the same - you can dial up some music, when you want, from a big selection, somewhere else. So really - what's the point in making a distinction legally between analog and digital transmission rights, if you can accomplish much the same thing with either?

Maybe I'm off-base but that's what I got out of it.

By the way, when you say:

The evil RIAA and MPAA? Yes, they occasionally go overboard (the mickey mouse extension act is pretty egregious), but generally they are in the right.

In the right legally, perhaps. Morally and logically, not so much.

Re:Why you people just dont get it.

[Anonymous Coward]

the term "bright lining" means doing some activity with a full knowledge of where the law or regulation is and doing something right up to this regulation, this living up to the letter of the law, though, the implication is, not the spirit.

Dude, I don't write the laws. When I pay my taxes, I am entitled to claim everything the tax authorities allow me to, even if they are stupid deductions, bad tax policy, and even though I am well off and could afford to pay more!

What's more, the tax authorities even encourage me to claim everything that I am entitled to.

Now, legality and morality are different things. Is the MIT system legal? It appears to be. Is claiming $150,000 in damages for 1 downloaded song legal? That's what the law says. Are either of these actions moral?

The music industry sidesteps the ban on payola to radio stations by using "independent promoters" to funnel their cash. Legal? Yes. It obeys the letter of the law while ignoring the intent.

This industry long ago abandoned morality.

Hurray for fair use

[glazed]

At least with this sort of system it stands a chance against courts and the RIAA. They can prove that they have all the music legally purchased, and potentially argue that the streaming they're doing is nothing more than playing music at a party.

If I've got a party with 150 people at it, I'm not required to pay royalties.