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MIT's Music Net Shut Down Over License Issues

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the easy-come-easy-go dept.

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?"

9 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Is it just me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    MIT students get to choose their own hostnames.

    As you might imagine, they get pretty interesting.

  2. Re:Is it just me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    No, the student very much has control over the hostname. They can change it to whatever they choose - we do not censor hostnames, except in extreme circumstances, or when they break the world (like localhost.mit.edu).

  3. Re:Excuse me... by heli0 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Free music?

    "LAMP had purchased $30,000 is music in digital format"

    The school paid for licenses for all of the music and then made it available in an analog format to its students.

    --
    Whenever the offence inspires less horror than the punishment, the rigour of penal law is obliged to give way...
  4. Maybe they should be more like us at WPI..... by Yenhsrav_Keviv · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  5. Re:Excuse me... by dbarclay10 · · Score: 2, Informative
    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?

    Read the fucking article, twit.

    The music wasn't free. MIT paid for it. That money came from tuition, donations, grants, and all sorts of things. (And before you say "donation money shouldn't be used ...", stop and consider that either the donation money is used for it, or tuition money is used and donation money is used to lower tuition - it's the same bloody thing. It goes into a big pot and then it gets spent.)

    --

    Barclay family motto:
    Aut agere aut mori.
    (Either action or death.)
  6. Re:common sense? by tgibbs · · Score: 2, Informative
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but just because they buy the CD and encode it, doesn't mean they have the license rights to "broadcast" it over their network. Maybe I'm missing something here.
    MIT already has broadcast rights, bought and paid for. They've been broadcasting music from their campus radio station for years. The problem seems to be that the company that sold them the digital versions did not have the right to do so. But it sounds like MIT could simply buy the physical CDs and rip them.
  7. Re:Excuse me... by Fnkmaster · · Score: 4, Informative
    They paid for music, $30,000 worth of music, and played it back in an analog, targeted-delivery format (not broadcast to the public). No different than playing the music over the music channels on the machines at the gym, or broadcasting it over an ultra-low-power (campus-area only) radio station. The only difference as far as I can tell is that you took turns being the "DJ".


    If the company they licensed the 30k worth of music from didn't have the rights to license it under these terms, then that's hardly MIT's fault.

  8. Re:Why are we plagued by this childish behavior? by jareds · · Score: 2, Informative

    Why does MIT get to broadcast music for free, and what does this have to do with mp3.com?

    MIT doesn't get to broadcast music for free, it gets to broadcast music under the licenses for which it pays ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC.

  9. Re:MIT have a case? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Where do you think Apple got its files from? Loudeye!

    I'd have thought it was up to MIT to set up deals with the labels, not Loudeye. All they do is rip the CD's, do data entry stuff, encode them and ship them.