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?"
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.
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.
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
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
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-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
"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.
It's just a campus CCTV channel with network-controlled programming. My school has been doing this for years, I'm confident that many schools have this configuration.
If they hadn't hyped this up as some kind of RIAA work-around, it'd still be running.
Also, when you're a campus radio or television station, you shouldn't have to buy your music. You should receive it in the mail for free, and for the purpose of broadcasting.
If you're about to buy something valuable,
like a house, it's part of your due diligence
to make sure the person selling the item
actually owns it. You can do this the dumb
way, by asking them if they own it (which MIT
did), or you can demand proof, do a background
check, title search, or similar MINIMAL
investigation.
Had MIT asked for the company's contract with
the RIAA, they could have reviewed things
directly. Heck, they even could have approached
the RIAA and asked them what they thought.
So, while lawyers do suck, it's clear those
at MIT suck, while those at the RIAA were the
head of the class, and on top of their game.
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?
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.
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