Slashdot Mirror
Legal Music Sharing Returns To MIT
An anonymous reader writes "Two MIT students relaunched MIT's believed-legal music sharing network today, using a Linux-based consumer audio device that also launches today as a commercial product. The 'Library Access to Music Project' (LAMP) system was first launched a year ago, but shut down after its content supplier encountered legal hurdles. The re-incarnated LAMP is based on StreetFire Sound's RBX1600, which network-enables multiple inexpensive consumer audio jukeboxes. So... what do you think? Does the new version look legal?"
PS: Anyone know of any good deals on hard drives? She filled up her 40 gig drive in the month since I put it in.
it's really sad how insightful this is. Now days, it doesn't seem to matter if something is legal or not, because a corporation can always stand to throw enough money and lawyers that it doesn't matter how right you are, it's impossible to win.
Mod parent up +5 insightful but sad.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
The core issue is not if this is legal under current legislation or not.
The core issue is how long we will have to wait until supply meets demand. There is a demand for technology like this, but thr RIAA and its peers realize stuff like this empowers consumers... thus they feel threatened.
This will ultimately be legal, regardless of wether it is now. One only has to wonder how much tax money (in god knows how many nations) will have to be spent on pointless lawsuits until we, the consumers, can finally get what we want at a reasonable price.
.: Max Romantschuk
But, he/she similarly totally misunderstands the point of copyright laws by playing "bright lining" games (as do, in my experience, many slashdot readers). ...
Are you sure about this? RIAA minions are doing bright lining ever since the topic came up, and were able to promote/force their interpretation of law and its spirit via media to the public by doing this, thus making it easier to lobby laws that in turn better fit the now-common interpretation of the law.
Bright lining is a Good Thing(tm). It shows that the law is ambiguous and need clarification, and that the public has not one, but more interpretations of the spirit of the law
Talk about abbreviation collision. Their common linux context makes this a possible source of confusion in the future.
Prosperity is only an instrument to be used, not a deity to be worshipped. Calvin Coolidge
In the faq of the LAMP site it says : "* Is this really legal? How? We are transmitting music over the non-digital portion of MIT's internal cable television system. Because it is impossible to record exact copies of CDs from a non-digital cable television system, under the copyright law the licensing requirements are less stringent than for over the Internet: similar to the requirements for radio stations." So since when were MP3s transferred over the internet exact copies of the CDs? I appreciate that LAMP have bulk-licenses, but a while back an idea for p2p sharers and peercasters to get radio-licenses was not accepted (by the p2p communities and advocates) as legal, so what's the difference?
"Fair Use" is NOT a cast-in-stone definition of how many pages it is ok to photocopy or that you can share your Mp3s with your sister but not your aunt. Rather, the idea is a set of INTERPRETED principles intended to balance the interests of varying members of society as a whole, including content producers and content users.
When idiots like these guys at MIT go about making devices built on the misconception that fair use is a cast in stone notion and that are aimed at circumventing the letter rather than the spirit of that imaginary cast-in-stone law, the results are predictable: rightsholders take legal action petitioning that such actions are so clearly contrary to the spirit of the law, the law has no choice but to come down hard, and, long story short, more often than not in the end fair use is eroded.
``go and do a little historical research about every attempt to do away with copyrights and patents completely''
Can you link to some examples? I actually believe that the system could work full well without IP laws. If you want innovation and creativity, you can sponsor them by other means. I would like to see the evidence to the contrary you appear to know about, so I can revise my views.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The biggest question is, how in the world can you tell if a backup or filesharing service is legal or not? The only way to really be sure is to monitor the network 24x7, which is an invasion of privacy. And even if you monitor for file names, the only way to REALLY be sure that someone isn't changing the name to fool you is to actually read the file. Then I could turn it around and say the file monitors are stealing from me, because if they can read my files, then they can copy them. The biggest problem is you can't gauge the intent of the person making a file backup. Maybe I'm a good little citizen and I'm making a personal backup. Maybe I'm not, and I just told all my friends where my files are so they can access them. Or maybe some people found my file stash accidentally, and are downloading my files without my concent. How do you prove which of these cases is true? You can't. Networks don't care: content is content. There are no physical boundaries to say which files belong to which people. (Unless you're talking about DRMed files, which in any case can be cracked to not point to a specific owner.)
I think people are overlooking what is really going on here.
There are two parts we need to look at:
1) Is the distribution system legal?
People keep on commenting on whether this is acceptable under copyright laws. This is a moot point. The real question is whether it is allowed under the MIT contract. Since that isn't posted I don't see how anyone can make an argument either way. If it's not allowed under the contract it is clearly infringement.
2) Even if it's acceptable, who cares? All this allows you to do is the equivilent to a radio station that you can make requests. The licence doesn't seem to give the students the right to RECORD these broadcasts on their PCs. That would still be infringement.
Of course as any good Slashdot reader, I only skimmed the article so I could be totally off base here. Oh, IANAL and this isn't legal advice.
Something which occurs to me:
If I buy a CD, I have the right ("first sale") to sell it again, or give it away. [provided that I don't keep a copy] I also have several hundred discs, but I can only listen to one at a time.
How about a system for buying and selling discs in realtime? Two questions need to be addressed:
1)If I physically destroy the original CD, am I allowed to sell the backup? Does this apply to an electronic copy if, as soon as I pass it on, I destroy my original?
2)In order to save bandwidth, is it necessary to destroy the orignal, or is it sufficient to render it unplayable? Obviously, I'd want to re-purchase it at some time, and a 650MB download is a pain. Would some form of cryptographic token suffice?
As far as I can tell, such a system would work effectively if everyone has at least say 10 CDs that they own at any time, so that the requested track would almost always be available from someone. I know it would be legal if I were to pass on the physical disc, but that requires a personal meeting. Is it possible to automate this?
Copyright is a socially constructed concept. Basically, copyrightholders are entitled to a monopoly of sorts for a limited time on their work. Most people agree that the primary reason for this is to encourage more creation of works.
The interesting thing is that we've run a few little controlled experiments over the years in whether this is needed: the obvious examples are fonts and recipes. Neither fonts nor recipes, for obscure reasons, are copyrightable. (Recipe books and software representations of fonts are copyrightable, however. The effect of this is hard to estimate, but it appears to be small: see the giant collections of both artifacts freely and legally available online.) The results of these little experiments may surprise some: there's no shortage of either. In fact, skilled folks still work very hard at producing them!
The theory that folks won't produce quality intellectual artifacts without financial compensation is just that: a theory. The open source movement is another powerful example of counter-evidence to that theory. Many economists believe that better theories are needed at this point.
I believe that copyright can still play a valuable role in our society, but not because it inspires the creation of intellectual works in any broad sense. Copyright serves a useful role by ensuring that the authors of work are properly credited. It also attempts to ensure that any profits that do happen to be generated as a result of using the work commercially are properly allocated. However, copyright law is massively overconstructed for the first of these goals, and generally fails miserably at the second (c.f. music).
I thus support major changes in the copyright law, including limits on assignability of profits under copyright, dramatic shortening of the time period of the copying provisions of copyright, and extension of the crediting provisions of copyright to perpetuity.