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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?
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.
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.
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
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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.
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!
Anybody?
How dare they step on RIAA turf? Avoiding paying artists and union musicians has always been the job of the RIAA member labels!
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.
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?
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