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MIT's New Music Sharing Network

Posted by Hemos on from the share-the-music dept.

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"."

2 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Microsoft Funded by Davak · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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

  2. Re:That's all nice and well by Oscillatory · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.