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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"."
If MIT students can't find methods to get MP3 off the 'net, nimbly sidestepping the R*AA and other assorted vultures... well; do they really deserve to be at MIT?
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If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
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.
SysWear - Geek T-shirts (UK/Europe)
The high-tech D.J. can select, rewind or fast-forward the songs via an Internet-based control panel.
Can he do it fast enough to reproduce the vinyl scratch effect ?
Trolling using another account since 2005.
of the evil-doer, and it is the RIAA, who shakes his bony fist and exclaims, "darn you meddling computer scientists!"
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!
Nice to see that the boys and girls at MIT likes Britney since "Baby One More Time" was number 4 most request song last week. Just can't get enough of Britney on the LAMP!
boston.com
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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...
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.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
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?)
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
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.
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act!" -- George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair)
*sigh*
Stick Men
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.
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.
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?
If I wanted easy I wouldnt be an engineer or a patriot.
Awesome! Now all I need is that ellusive TiVo -> iPod software and cable bundle.
Ballmer: Windows is more secure than open source code
From the article, for those who read all the way: "Mr. Winstein said he once received an e-mail message from a fellow student complimenting him on his choice of music (Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 8) and telling him "I'd like to get to know you better." She signed the note, "Sex depraved freshman."" This is a freshman girl at MIT... who is looking for loving... wants to get to know a gangly CS grad student... I AM STUPIFIED. Know what this means? This clinches it. The only reason we nerds are not getting any is because we're not looking for it. We're looking up net porn and wondering why we don't have girlfriends, while this girl's crying in her room about why we're not asking her out. Get out of your rooms and face the sun, gentlemen! Take a stand! Make this the day that college dorks around the world get girlfriends! WHO'S WITH ME?!
--Leo
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.
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...
Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
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.
(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.
Anybody remember this?
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?
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
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.
Here's the registration-required link, shamefully omitted from the original post. (For all you anti-privacy zealots)
Any sufficiently simple magic can be passed off as mere advanced technology.
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.
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
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?