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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"."
A good idea in foresigh, but we all know the RIAA will demand some insane fee as they aren't traditional broad-casters or slaves to MTV...and when they don't pay, RIAA will send an army of lawyers after them...
Quote at the bottom of the page:
LAMP is funded by the iCampus Alliance (MIT/Microsoft Research)
http://lamp.mit.edu
Okay, slashdot... does Microsoft get any props here?
(oh, sh!t, there goes my Karma.)
Davak
I'm a college student, and I can honestly say that if I had this I would use it.
I would use it to record all the songs I didn't already have on mp3. And for all the songs I couldn't get through this system, I would still hit the p2p. I don't supposed they have Super Eurobeat or garage bands music do they? No? The store doesn't either? Downloads for me.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
I wouldn't bank on it. It sounds like they have simply given end-user control to the same type of cable-tv music channels that practically every digital cable package includes. In essence, they have created a new and improved "Listener Request Show" on said cable music channels.
I'd think that any law against what MIT is doing would either prohibit broadcast of analog music (fat chance), listeners making requests for songs to play (fat chance), or be so acutely targeted at this LAMP system that it would beg to be tried in court.
My lesson for today is that ingenuity trumps legislation. The RIAA would be better off if they tried more things like 50 Cent putting golden tickets in retail CD cases. Not that this is the only or best solution, but at least the guy is doing something new and untried to get his album platinum and discourage piracy.
It's basically a free version of Launch. Which is all very well but does it really take MIT to think this up. First time I used Launch I thought "wouldn't it be cool if this was free".
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Some of these are the kinds of restrictions that are being imposed on licensed webcasters, including e.g. webcast from a college radio station
Broadcast radio has no such restrictions except as self-imposed by bad corporate radio
1. Playing more than 3 songs from a specific album in an hour.
2. Playing more than 4 songs by a specific artist in an hour.
2. Announcing their playlist to the public in advance.
3. Playing entire songs without voiceover/overlap
These rules are to prevent the exact scenario you are proposing.
Would you say it is then misguided for 50 Cent to put golden tickets for diamonds in 4 of his first million CD cases for his latest album? Johnny Cash's "American 4" included a DVD of a single video for the same price as a top name CD (and Cash certainly fits that bill.) These are plans to redefine the value of CD purchase to include something that fans cannot (easily) get by file sharing and seem to acknowledge that society tolerates this admitted widescale copyright infringement.
I'm not disagreeing, but curious how you would resolve these major label acts that are attempting to give fans a legitimate incentive to purchase the CD rather than download. As far as I'm concerned, it isn't a complete failure. "American 4" was the first CD I've bought in several years and specifically because I wanted the DVD with the video. If not for that, I would have likely downloaded the content regardless of a quasi-legal system like MIT's or stricter laws on outright file sharing.
Exactly. But it's a legal alternative to the traditional buy-a-CD-of-twelve-songs-even-though-you-might-onl y-like-two-of-them model. I wasn't suggesting that it was independent of RIAA, only that it was one of the many legal alternatives that challenges RIAA's status quo.
If in twelve months time, 10, 15 or even 20 percent (to use arbitrary figures off the top of my head) of the music being bought by 10-25 year-olds is through online buy-just-what-you-want stores, then that'll be a very big wake-up call to RIAA and the major labels.
In that scenario (which most probably happen eventually), the big boys will have to re-evaluate how they package, present and sell music on a wider scale. Right now, they probably look at iTunes as in interesting exercise, just as IBM once looked at PC clones in the same way. But sooner or later, just like IBM and those clones, RIAA et al will have to embrace a future that's not entirely of their making.
And the less involvement that RIAA has in the music industry of the future, the better for us all, regardless of where we live and/or our musical tastes.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Brilliant. This is why a system of laws that was supposed to enlarge the public domain with excellent works now serves the intersts of the worlds large publishers. We have gone from 28 year copyrights to perpetual copyrights in less than 100 years. If you think things are right, you are a slave and will take any old shit shoveled your way.
The result is that big publishers have all the power. They don't have pay artists, authors, scientists or anyone. That's because they control the channels of distribution and can force any old junk they feel like. Is it reasonable to you that 30 year old music dominates the airwaves of this country? Is it reasonable to you that scientist do all the editorial work for magazines without compensation and then pay to have their work published? Is it reasonable to you that those scientific publications are so expensive that even major universities can't aford them? The extrapolation to digital media is even worse.
The students at MIT can share 3,500 RIAA records, great fucking big deal. They are shafted because the world is much larger than those few songs or even the RIAA. Good luck trying to get original work onto that network, it's not going to happen. The students of MIT will only get more RIAA dog food out of this new network.
What you don't get is that the whole basis of copyright law is broken. When the founding fathers of this country made 14 year copyrights, they did so because publishing was expensive and they felt it needed to be encouraged in the vast wilderness that was the US at the time. These conditions are obviously untrue today. Publishing is cheap and the protections needed are proportionatly lower. The public domain can and will grow better if copyright law is scrapped alltogether.
It's over already, really. Scientists have gone out of their way to publish their own peer reviewed journals because it's cheaper to them. Others will follow and leave the RIAA and other rapists like that in the same dustbin that Edison's Phonograph patents are sitting.
The God given truth is that information sharing is good and moraly correct. Things that get in the way are evil. Greed heads like the RIAA are a particularly evil bunch of pimps.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
However, this may pose a political problem. RIAA's argument is that they are not trying to retract existing privileges, such as recording music off the radio. Rather, they argue, the ability of digital technology to make "perfect" copies is a unique threat that must be combatted with restrictions specifically directed to the digital format. So to go after MIT, they basically have to admit that this argument is basically a load of crap, and that they are trying to impose new restrictions on what people can do with broadcast music. Of course, the reality is that nobody but a minority of audiophiles cares about "perfect" copies, and they aren't interested in trading compressed formats like mp3, anyway. The MIT initiative offers what the average student really wants--the ability to select the music they want.
I agree.
Imagine a radio station that allowed one listener at a time to log into the radio stations website and control the play list for the next 80 minutes. A cool idea, but not anything revolutionary. They just multiply this basic idea by 16 channels and broadcast over cable instead of FM. Why would the RIAA care? Until every user has control over their own playlist, what's the big deal?
I doubt this threatens the RIAA, and I'd be surprised if the number of Kazaa downloads from the MIT network decreased as a result.
Now give EVERY user control over their own channel and you've got an interesting system. That's when the RIAA sends in the lawyers.
Cheers
No, But, never fear, someone else at MIT built this robotic DJ that can: DJ I Robot
DJ I ROBOT uses a PC, several micro-controllers, and an advanced "motion control" system to automatically mix, scratch, and search a pair of custom vinyl records on the robotic phonographs.
I don't really see what the big idea is with the MIT LAMP system. The N Y Times is touting it as a new creative music 'on demand' system that has the potential to curb the rampant p2p campus file-sharing that has cause numerous legal and bandwidth issues. The central problem with this characterization is that it is largely hype. The system is only marginally more 'on demand' than regular radio. It broadcasts 16 universally accessible channels much in the way that satellite radio works today. The only advantage is that you get to see the playlist ahead of time and perchance reserve time in the near/far future to become a DJ on one of the stations. The so called 'on demand' feature entails being thrown in a queue of students/faculty so as to be able to listen to a specific album at an unspecified time. Other than price it would seem that this system has no advantage over internet 'streamers' (such as rhapsody, e-music, and music-match) which allow you to choose from either 100s of thousands of albums or artists for instantaneous listening all for a small monthly/yearly fee. IMHO, what made file-sharing so popular was not only the free access to a huge selection of music but the near instant gratification one enjoyed as a result of high speed networks. The internet streamers allow all this with the caveat of a nominal fee. The MIT LAMP system, however, denies the desire of music consumers to access what they want when they want it. As a result this system will do little if anything to ultimately curb either the number and volume of files being shared or the concomitant lawsuits generated by the RIAA
Of course it's possible to get MP3s for free here at MIT. But so many music-downloaders spend all their time whining about how the RIAA doesn't give any money to artists and if they just did that and didn't keep huge profits themself they'd support them. Well, LAMP actually involves legally paying the artists (especially the songwriters) involved.
--dave, actual LAMP user
Let me get this straight: we already have numerous P2P networks through which people can freely share digital media. These guys have created a system that distributes ANALOG versions of digital songs; only distributes data deigned appropriate by a central authority; only distributes locally, not worldwide; only allows users to hear the music from their TV, and not move it elsewhere.
And this is supposed to be a good thing?
No wonder Microsoft is funding the research... creating "innovations" that make people's lives worse instead of better seems to be their specialty.
The only "benefit" I can see from the MIT system over P2P file sharing is that the MIT system allows the RIAA executives to continue to harvest extreme wealth from the creativity of underpaid artists and the greed of contribution-hungry politician.
Instead of creating technical kludges that make our lives worse instead of better, would it not be better to junk the DMCA and other obsolete copyright laws bought and paid for by the RIAA and friends?