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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?
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. "
There's expressed demand here. People are saying "we want compressed music we can put on portable devices, we want individual tracks as opposed to complete albums, and we want to be charged reasonably for it." Since the RIAA isn't responding to supply and demand (Why should they? They're an oligopoly!) they won't provide these. The result? The people find their own way to get what they want. This didn't happen overnight. It started way back in 96-97. It really din't become a 'let the cat out of the bag' situation until Napster was sued. Oops RIAA, good job.
The RIAA really fouled up here. They forced people to solve their own distribution problems, and now they have to face the very real possibility that their customers are so independent delivery-wise that the RIAA is not as necessary for an artist to become popular.
Double oops, RIAA.
There are quite a few people here that think this whole music thing is about getting music for free. There are bound to be cases where it is true, but in the vast majority of cases it's not even close to being the only factor. Once the RIAA figures this out, assuming it's not too late, they'll be able to provide the services these people want instead of butting heads with places like MIT.
Hey RIAA, how about fulfilling consumer demand? Ya make more money that way than with lawsuits.
"Derp de derp."
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
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!
we want individual tracks as opposed to complete albums,
I would be so happy if the facts in this case supported that argument. According to the LAMP website, 9 out of the top 10 songs played this week are from the same Coldplay album (however long that 'week' actually represents...).
From this I would suggest that music buyers want good music, be it in album or single form. However, in the absence of good music they will listen to any old trash with minimum clothing. The music labels know this and strippers are cheaper than singers.
Anybody?
I think that we'll soon have a choice: free with hassles (you don't pay a thing for The Dark Side of the Moon over IRC, but you have to jump through some hoops to get it), or convenient outlets for shelling out your money in smaller quantities in exchange for music. Which will you pick?
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.
I don't know, I'm here at MIT, and the response to both the inception of LAMP and its destruction was extremely apathetic. A whole bunch of people I know used it once for the novelty ("Hey, that's kinda cool.") and went back to their machines in their rooms and played _their_ music. It was frustrating; I think there were 16 channels? It was more like an all request radio station than an MP3 player, so you had to listen to everyone else's crappy music, too.
I can't say much about us taking it personally; I live on West Campus and we're, sterotypically, the more "normal" kids on campus. I can't speak for the kids on East who are more MIT stereotypical (who are the types of kids typically behind these types of engineering projects), but I don't think many people care about this whole thing.
I guess after a while the novelty of all the nerdy things starts to dwindle. Sure, it sounds cool that people were able to "outsmart" the RIAA, but, when it comes down to sheer usability, it didn't score very high marks.
If there is hand-waving done in the proportionality of compensation, then all that is acheived by using one of the services is protection from them suing you (without any true, legal use of the copyrighted material). Racketteering.
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