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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"."

9 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. God help them! by jkrise · · Score: 5, Funny

    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?

    -

    --
    If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
  2. Scratch ? by mirko · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.
  3. 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

    1. Re:Microsoft Funded by kaiidth · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Microsoft are funding a bunch of campus style software and such. iCampus 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.

  4. Analog file sharing. by yoder · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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)
  5. Analogue vs Digital by rbbs · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  6. Hell's frozen over, folks. by gertsenl · · Score: 5, Funny

    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
  7. 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.
  8. Why you people just dont get it. by mumblestheclown · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.