Slashdot Mirror
MIT's Music Net Shut Down Over License Issues
aurum42 writes "MIT's LAMP music-over-cable initiative has been shut down due to licensing concerns, as reported on The Boston Globe. Ars Technica has a good summary of the story. It appears that Loudeye did not have the rights to sell music to MIT for distribution over cable, although they apparently assured MIT that they did in fact have those rights. Murky, unexplored legal quagmire or RIAA influenced revisionism?"
Does MIT have a case to sue Loudeye? Seems Loudeye misrepresented themselves. It may be better/easier if MIT simply works in partnership with an organization that does has a lot of agreements with the music industry already, like Apple or such. Maybe an MIT branded iTunes?
or doesn't MIT usually let these kinds of things go. I mean come on they're the College who have a subdomain called fuck-the-skull-of-jesus.mit.edu. I really hope the RIAA hasn't managed to actually influence them in any way.
Hold up, wait a minute, let me put some pimpin in it
1. MIT found a way to "get around" the system using the analog hole.
2. RIAA picked holes in contracts until they could close down MIT's system.
Nothing new here. RIAA is still evil.
How to now get free music? There are more than enough geeky MIT students to find a solution to the problem. MIT-only file sharing? Passing around burned copies of CDs? Having everyone switch to using Kazaa? All I know is that something new will show up sooner or later to replace LAMP.
Taking away music from college students won't do anything but make them mad. If this was the RIAA's doing, they've just screwed themselves. Dealing with a few bitter music fans is bad enough; a college campus full could be their undoing...
Goo goo g'joob.
The RIAA here is directly charging MIT with trying to break copyright. There are not suggesting that MIT made a mistake... or that Loudeye misrepresented itself.
The RIAA is trying to make an example out of MIT.
MIT: We're clever engineers, we've found a legal way to distribute that saves tons of money!
RIAA: Fuck you. And fuck you. Busted.
Murky, unexplored legal quagmire or RIAA influenced revisionism?
Neither. Crystal-clear matter of law, rightly dispensed with. If you do not own rights to the music, you may not distribute the music. Pretty freakin' clear, that.
The Lamp folks appeared on CNBC on friday talking about this. They also said that the software was up at www.mit.edu under one of the freeware licenses. I dare say that if it had just stayed on campus, it may have flown under the RIAA's radar. As it was, somebody felt they had to shut it down before everyone else in the world did it. jmo.
Since you're not signing any contract when you copy the music, there wouldn't be a problem here. The music would play and people would be happy.
-Libertarian secular transhumanist
But we told you so!
(-1, Redundant, blah blah blah [come on, get me, I have karma to burn (No, Really, go for it)])
====
Crudely Drawn Games
MIT Music is down?????
I don't wanna go back to FM Radio or listening to CDs!!
Why, again, do the slashdot editors seem to imply that college students should have free access to commercial free music? For god's sake, if you are going to go communist for college students, why not just imply that college students should get a free education, room, and board?
I don't get it.
So, Loudeye had some dimwitted salesperson with a big mouth. Shocking. Just shocking.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
They can't REALLY be blocking all of these mediums? What the heck are they trying to do here?
;) )
.02
Plus, look at what they've done to the quality of music. I don't know if anyone agrees, but most of what comes out is like BUBBLEGUM ROCK...nothing really new or orignal happening here, except on the indy labels that the RIAA don't touch.
I hear more interesting music in downtown NY on a streetcorner than I do on the radio.
THE RIAA is killing itself. It kindof reminds me of that Gene Roddenberry show EARTH: FINAL CONFLICT. Those TAELONS were sterile and were a dying race, but they were trying to RULE all of humanity.
I really think that the RIAA has this as their mission-statement: they want to rule all media, digitally, CD wise, radio...they are sucking the soul out of music, just the same way that the Taelons were sucking the life out of everything human.
(Sorry to use such a SCI-FI metaphor, but there is just no classic juxtaposition that I could come up with to parallel the EVIL of the RIAA...PLUS this is slashdot, so everyone has seen that show, right??!
I'm surprised that the RIAA and MPAA haven't teamed up to be a SUPER-company that manages ALL digital content.....
a matter of time, I'm sure.....
my
This is the same kind of crap that RIAA pulled on MP3.Com! Legally, I can buy a CD with music on it. Legally, I can encode a CD to MP3s and put them on my hard drive. Legally I can upload my MP3s from my hard drive to my remote server to listen to them at work, etc. I could probably even legally mail my CD to someone and hire them to encode it for me.
But just because MP3.Com took it one logical step further and encoded their copy of your CD to elimiate shipping costs, they were found guilty of copyright infringement.
Here we have an MIT setup where if they bought a bunch of CDs and hired a bunch of students to encode them it's legal, but if they just buy the already encoded songs, it's illegal. This kind of legal hair-splitting is such crap.
I don't know if this is a situation where people need to grow some balls and actually stand up to these kind of logical quagmires or a case where courts are idiotic enough to buy such arguments. And while we are on the subject, it's worth pointing out that if I distribute music over coaxial cable I'm apparently fine but if I distribute over twisted pair, I'm aching for a lawsuit.
And MPAA and RIAA wonder why people don't respect the laws about copyright...
- JoeShmoe
.
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
No, I won.
First of all the MIT system uses some of the systems of HAVARDNET which is a subsiderary of Microsoft. A lot of has to be due to big business relation to this and they are worry that the RIAA is going to sue them and MIT for copywright violation. So its from Coporate sponsership that this resulted in this shutdown of the cable service.
" Why, again, do the slashdot editors seem to imply that college students should have free access to commercial free music? "
Why do people think a performance of music is worth more than the air that carries it?
I certainly don't.
The RIAA may disagree, but that seems to be their problem, not mine. After all, I think my time is worth a million dollars an hour. My job is practically stealing from me by paying me only $101,000 a year. Now if I could only get a law passed that said my company had to employee me and they had to pay whatever I wanted, then life would be sweet and I'd be rich.
What? They're outsourcing me to India? Damn. Its like stealing! Lets have a congressional hearing!
That would be sweet!
"Murky, unexplored legal quagmire or RIAA influenced revisionism?"
No, this isn't a quagmire. It isn't unexplored legal territory. We've been reading about this for years. The lawyers have been interpreting and representing for existing laws surprisingly well. Pro bonos and non-sell outs are getting ready to form new rules that take many of the old rules into account. Competitive, P2P type music industry is just around the corner. Everyone wants it. The RIAA will apply maximum litigation wherever they think copyrights are being infringed. The RIAA hawks have done just about all the revising they can.
Why did they shut down M.I.T.? It's a small group of supply-side elitists, aristocrats (bourgeoisie) and government oligarchs who don't want things to change. TOO BAD. The methods of delivering music mainstream are changing and for the better. This is a temporary setback and students, programmers, hackers etc. will find legitimate, copyright-compatible ways to deliver music sooner or later.
over here, we've had a network filesharing program for years. Early on stuff like kazaa and other p2p programs were banned, and well, we started using Gnucleus's Lan client. Maybe they should do the same if they already haven't.
I wonder if the legal solutions to this latest RIAA shutdown will come sooner than the technical solutions. Would MIT officials and administrators put their lawyers on their tab and cut through the legal redtape for some music before some bored MIT students offer a fix or alternatives to LAMP? I'm betting that a RIAA-backed shut down of "music for students" is not a research priority to world-renown professors and big research grants but it's a big deal to the typical college students right? There's probably a bunch of them working on an alternative if they're thinking like this:
"We'll all find a way to get around it," said Faisal Reza, 20, a student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "People who want music will always be one step ahead of people trying to stop them." -from CNN.com when the RIAA shut down Napster. Oh yea!
nt
Like Germany? And most of Europe, which has very low tuition at public universities...
LOAD "SIG",8,1
Interesting? This isn't interesting. There's not enough information in the article to say what exactly is or isn't. Now what would be interesting is if someone posted the actual contracts. Then one could make an informed post as weither this was indeed "picking a hole" or a big misunderstanding.
BTW Taco fix your site. Mozilla 1.4 doesn't post, konq, and IE do.
"Taking away music from college students won't do anything but make them mad."
If that makes them mad? Then they're really going to be pissed when the artists stop making music. People might have to go back to banging on pots and pans for entertainment.
As General Ackbar once said, "dont do it, its a trap!"
Dont click the links!
Anybody?
Ah yes, another insightful. Abolish the social contract that brought people the music they presently enjoy. So what are people going to replace it with? How about the "You give us whatever you produce, free of charge" contract? I'm certain the artists are going to be chomping at the bit for that one.
Street vendor sells me car stereo, and repeatedly assures me it is his stereo to sell. Murky, unexplored legal quagmire or RIAA influenced revisionism?
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Turns out a couple college kids aren't smarter then the RIAA after all. I'm shocked, really. I'm sure they are too.
But everyone here knew it couldn't last, only geeks are bored enough to work for free, musicians need money for drugs.
They did however get enough fame out of it to last them a good long time. And that's what it's really all about in the business world. As long as you can get to the CNBC studio _before_ they shut you down, you're golden.
- Adam L. Beberg - The Cosm Project - http://www.mithral.com/
How dare they step on RIAA turf? Avoiding paying artists and union musicians has always been the job of the RIAA member labels!
I have to say, Mr. Anonymous Coward,
that your story is perhaps the most entertaining
and ingenious thing I've seen in many months.
Congrats, says I!
If only I had been blessed with some mod points
today, I would have modded you up '+5 Informative'
Hamsters are at least as feathery as penguins. HamLix
trying to sue every new attempt that MIT students come up with.
Can I bum a sig?
I for one would be grateful if places with clout, like MIT, would spend their resources advocating for better policy rather than engaging in legal contortions. If MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Princeton, Yale, NYU, etc. threw *serious* support behind good policy (like the Eldred act, IMHO), the RIAA would find it much harder to have their way with congress. Admittedly, uniting these institutions of intellectual debate is much easier said than done, but they are uniquely equipped to put forth balanced proposals that address a broader social agenda than would ever emerge from an industry lobby. We could really use someone with the clout, resources, intelligence and neutrality of MIT to help write (and right) the rules of the game that are fair to *all* the stakeholders, not just the RIAA.
What we are finding is that leaving the fox (the RIAA) to guard the hen-house (IP policy) is great for the fox and bad for everyone else.
in soviet russia, loudeye hears you!
http://www.fsckin.com/
I do beleive it was I who won.
Mewon'dz.
If you read the press release from Loudeye it's clear that they knew exactly what MIT intended to do with their $30,000 purchase. Hell, Loudeye claims they are the only company authorized to arrange this type of licensing scheme for MIT. How can they turn around and claim now that MIT didn't ask them for the right kind of licenses? What, did Loudeye just forget to tell MIT about the problem? What did Loudeye's execs. expect would happen?
But you've really got to love the quote from Vivendi;
Kelly Mullens, a spokeswoman for Vivendi Universal's Universal Music Group, said, "It is unfortunate that MIT launched a service in an attempt to avoid paying recording artists, union musicians and record labels. Loudeye recognized that they had no right to deliver Universal's music to the MIT service, and MIT acted responsibly by removing the music."
Now let me see if I understand this: I design a legal music service for college students. I contact a company that tells me they have music rights for sale, I buy them for $30,000 and then I start the service. But, less than a week later, a music label calls me on the carpet, claiming I 'avoided paying music artists, union musicians and record labels'? What was the $30,000 to Loudeye for then, if not a payment on behalf of recording artists, union musicians and recording labels? Did Vivendi not get their cut, miss the memo, what?
It's beyond me why the music industry would want to shut down the LAMP service. I mean, as I understand it, it's more like a radio station than an MP3 download tool like Napster or Kazaa. Does this mean that the labels don't want college kids listening to music legally? Did radio-like venues become taboo or something while I slept? This debacle is sure to send one message clearly to students across the US - there is no way to stay legally compliant with the RIAA and still listen to music. Now, what's that message likely to encourage?
Does this mean that Hillary Rosen will actually turn out to be a member of the resistance? Will the RIAA suddenly convert from an energy based species of enlightened thugs to a pack of neanderthalish brutes? Will the Amish be attacked by RIAA butterflies? Will hundreds of plot holes abound?
Won't be long and everything will be illegal.
You'll glance and a billboard and be microcharged.
Dive by another car and hear a bit of their stereo and you'll pay.
They inject it into your ears and eyes and it'll be illegal to refuse.
Sick of lawyers.
Sick of government.
And I'm sick of you telling me that it's their right by law to do what they want.
I FUCKING HATE THE RIAA.
Fortunately, one of the major benefits of listening to underground (or whatever) type music is that I don't have to worry about them (and yeah, I check out if the label is part of it or not.)
I'm tired of the lies, price fixing, screwing of artists and -screwing- of consumers.
They can go to hell.
And see just how legit the people working for the RIAA really are?
I'm sure none of them are running illegal software, or have -any- MP3s, for that matter.
Let's turn the tables on these assholes.
Most people imagined this system would be closed quickly. Changing Loudeye's contract was a really simple method and one I should have seen.
What, did Loudeye just forget to tell MIT about the problem? What did Loudeye's execs. expect would happen?
What you have witnessed is the death of a loophole. You have to imagine that the MIT super digital request play over traditional analog broadcast was legal a few weeks ago. The RIAA companies, being a racket, can change their terms at will They simply changed the terms and no one will ever get terms that work that way again.
there is no way to stay legally compliant with the RIAA and still listen to music
Oh sure there is. You just have to listen to what they want you to hear, not what you want to hear. It's all about maintaining a 100 year old distribution method. It has to come at the cost of your freedom of choice and is maintained by creating a scarcity of something as cheap as a song and dance. Digital technology, combined with ultra represive laws, can make things that much worse. Your government likes restricting what you hear as well, so the two are natural allies.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Back when I first heard about it, my immediate reaction was (and I quote, from a thread on another forum) "They underestimate the RIAA. They employ a lot of lawyers, they'll find a reason to sue them."
My gut reaction was right.
And they're stupid for pissing off MIT students. It's a really bad idea. They have to be really smart to get in, and they'll take this personally.
Mod "Overrated" instead of replying "I disagree with you," you coward.
1. MIT had a blanket license for campus broadcasting
3. Theyre not distributing pressed copies of music they are broadcasting on cable tv channels.
The only thing that is crystal clear here is that the RIAA leaned hard on loudeye and made it plain that it would be in their best interest to be reasonable and do it the RIAA's way
2. They bought the music from a firm that supplies to radio broadcasters.
I'm not sure if they're disallowing p2ping at MIT, but...
Do they not have IRC at MIT(shudders, man that sounded like a really bad rhyme, in my head))?
Or here's good one. Go to alltheweb.com, click on 'audio' then type in the name of the song or band you're looking for. Voila.
I don't understand. Is that equivalent to buying the music, but not being able to play it? If I bought a CD, doesn't that mean I'm allowed to listen to it, even with my friends?
Is RIAA the single most criminal company in the US? What other company can sell things made by people that don't get paid for making them?
Friends don't let friends by RIAA music. It's that simple.
Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom. It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves.
That you believe that, if Coldplay started stripping, it would increase their marketability amongst MIT students!
As far as I know, Coldplay have never stripped publicly, for the purposes of advertising or otherwise, and I would like to take this opportunity to respectfully request that they never do so.
Surely MIT's radio station has thousands of CDs on hand. Why not just use those CDs as the source of music to broadcast over the cable? If it's just a PITA to rip them all, there are probably 1000 volunteers who would be willing to rip CDs for free.
aQazaQa
For thousands of years, musicians played directly for people, and there was no "intellectual property". The law reflected reality.
Now RIAA have enjoyed a monopoly on recording equipment for nearly a century. Now that reality is over.
The law does not reflect today reality, and must change. (A little pain in the process)
Digitizing a performance is just like an open air concert: Everybody in the neigbourhood can hear it. Here the neigbourhood is the planet, and that is that.
don't cut it off www.mgmbill.org
Lawyers can defend even acknowledged ruthless child serial killers, so complaining about their defence of the music studios is pointless; it's in the nature of legal argument to ignore all arguments against one's position and only focus on supportive ones, so the RIAA lawyers are deaf by design, by training. Likewise, the studios are doing as required by law in defending the income of their shareholders, so the most one can really complain about is the lack of vision of their executives. If you really want to get to the source of the current problem, you need to look at the artists themselves, because as long as they continue to sell their souls to the studio system, it follows as night follows day that the studios will continue to capitalize from it.
Buy a music mag and try to find any groundswell of opinion among artists in favor of their listeners and against the policies of the studios and against the actions of the RIAA. Once in a blue moon you'll find a high-profile celebrity like Janis Ian, but they're lone voices rather than part of a trend. There is no groundswell of opinion among the artists in favor of removing the studios from the loop. They continue to buy into the music industry hype, because it's the done thing in their world. They don't feel that they've made it until they're mentioned in the music press buzz, which is an inherent part of the studio propaganda machinery.
I don't know how this vicious circle can be broken, but it's being fed daily by countless signings of new artists to the labels, and trying to combat the RIAA and other symptoms instead of the root cause is not likely to be very productive.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
The whole setup RI/MPAA is trying to establish is EVERY time you watch or listen you're supposed to pay in the long run.
In other words if there's something new where people don't pay per listening/viewing session it will be crushed by the lawyers of the aforementioned 'Organizations'. As long as we don't find a politician that works for the people, this is how the future will be.
The brother/sister orgs of RI/MPAA here in Europe told the lawmakers to get rid of the 'fair use' right by naming it an American thing that should be banned anyway. Main Problem is: politicians don't care about people (exception: there is a public vote comming).
Face it, as soon as some scientist (paid by MP/RIAA) figures out a patented way of charging for your hearing/seeing ability, we all will be paying for the fact that we're infringing copyrights all the time, like you're paying for blank CDs, Tapes and DVDs to compensate for 'possible' infringements right now and most politicians will think this will create jobs.
my 2 cents
If there are hundreds of thousands of independent artists, music that is original, and as good or lots better, why not move on?
A special event suggestion: Set a week or two, where every webcaster, college station, public radio station on the Internet, plays only those artists that do not demand royalties. Let's see if we don't have a huge pool of songs, artists, and stations that can come out of this event, with audiences that are bigger and more loyal than what is taking place with the RIAA nonsense.
I suggest we do it the second or third week of January, 2004, as SONG STORM is set to launch on January 15, 2004. hint. hint.
Anyone like this idea? Let me know, so I can help.tompoe@studioforrecording.org