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"."

Comments

Microsoft Funded

[Davak]

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

Re:That's all nice and well

[Oscillatory]

Don't radio stations have all sorts of restrictions on how much control the users have over the playlists? IIRC, the restrictions range from: the radio station being strictly prohibited from publishing its playlist, request shows requiring at least an hour between when someone calls in a song to when they actually play it, DJs being required to talk over the beginning and end of the songs, and requring the DJ to not tell you the name of the song until after it has played.

Some of these are the kinds of restrictions that are being imposed on licensed webcasters, including e.g. webcast from a college radio station .. or at least things like can't publish a song on the playlist before it's been played, can't play an entire album, or more than three songs from the same album within 2 hours (something like that).

Broadcast radio has no such restrictions except as self-imposed by bad corporate radio .. college radio certainly doesn't require any of the above.

Re:Way to go. Not.

[WIAKywbfatw]

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.

Re:That's all nice and well

[tgibbs]

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

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.