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?"
They're always so progressive. I love MIT.
Do they have an SCO license for their linux :-)
Notwithstanding the rather unfortunate name this project has a serious potential.
"Does the new version look legal?"
Of course it looks legal, but is it enough to avoid lawsuits? Very unlikely. MIT is the very place where the hacker culture were born, so obviously it is the first place for RIAA to keep an eye on.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
... if it's legal or not? They'll still get mugged by the lawyers. Legality has little to do with issues like this anymore.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Whoever came up with this idea is clever. But, he/she similarly totally misunderstands the point of copyright laws by playing "bright lining" games (as do, in my experience, many slashdot readers).
(the term "bright lining" means doing some activity with a full knowledge of where the law or regulation is and doing something right up to this regulation, this living up to the letter of the law, though, the implication is, not the spirit.)
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.
When people talk in terms of "it's legally okay to copy a song from the radio" or "it's legally okay to copy three pages, but not the whole book", then they are basically referring to PRAGMATIC copyright interpreations and rulings based on past technological and social circumstance. as technology and social circumstance change, it may become necessary to change (usually tighten) what is allowed in order to best preserve the spirit and intention of copyright, which, again, is to encourage authors.
here's a really obvious sign of when the spirit of copyright is broken--i call it the "extrapolation" argument. basically, somebody takes an existing interpretation and tries to "scale it up":
-sharing music with your kid sister is ok, so sharing music with everybody's kid sister is (Napster)
-photocopying one page is ok, so let's set up a distributed system via amazon's new full-text thing by which everybody downloads one page and somehow they are combined again (slashdot/amazon)
-MIT has a blanket license for analog music / copying music from existing analog sources of music is ok (radio - unscheduled recordings, includes ads, not complete songs), so let's play a clever trick by which people can get whatever they want in a high quality, but analog format (MIT)
All three of these will work, in the short term. And all three will generate stricter interpretations and a clamp-down, because they are so clearly against the spirit of the socially beneficial copyright law (oh, shut up already, completely-anti-copyright anarcho-libertarians - go and do a little historical research about every attempt to do away with copyrights and patents completely). The end result of this will be stricted interpretations and more bitching and whining on slashdot. What is the root cause of this? The evil RIAA and MPAA? Yes, they occasionally go overboard (the mickey mouse extension act is pretty egregious), but generally they are in the right.
The root cause is those who think that they're being clever by bright-lining copyright interpretations without realizing that they are interpretations that are subject to reasonable modification as circumstances warrant, not god-given cast-in-stone truths. or, in other words, more technological sense than social understanding.
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 the law doesn't seem to matter that much in this case. It's just like getting a cd player (or a bunch) and extending the headphone wire all the way to your friend's house (or houses) right? That's not illegal is it?
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?
The full article clearly stated that MIT *HAS* a license:
LAMP distributes music in analog form, over MIT's cable TV network, which enables it to be covered by licenses MIT already has with copyright clearinghouses such as BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC, in much the same way that the campus radio station is covered.
This means that they pay 2 cents or whatever for each song played. The RIAA *is* getting their money. Everything appears to be legal since its an analogue broadcast over the cable network at MIT. It basically is a radio station using wires instead of wireless.
Since they have a contract, why is this even a question? Why are so many people already claiming that its bordreline or the RIAA will sue even if its legal. The RIAA doesnt go after radio stations, yes they pay to play the music, but they dont do it. Why would they because MIT is doing it on their TV network rather than via RF?
I am ow wondering how many people read the articles before posting replies to /.
All fine words, but MIT licensed it and paid for exactly that: Analogue streams played from CDs to their students, so its not a copyright issue.
No-one, other than you, is claiming that their contract requires "Adverts", "Incomplete songs" & "Unscheduled recordings", "degraded analogue" or any other such condition.
It will just make them crack down on existing privileges. For example:
"LAMP distributes music in analog form, over MIT's cable TV network, which enables it to be covered by licenses MIT already has with copyright clearinghouses such as BMI, ASCAP, and SESAC, in much the same way that the campus radio station is covered."
Bye-bye to the permissve "licenses MIT already has with copyright clearinghouses". Nice knowin' ya.
Not to mention:
"Copyright restrictions on analog distribution systems are more permissive than those on digital systems, because the lossy nature of analog-to-digital conversion prevents perfect copies from being made."
So long "permissive analog distributions", you're now marked for death also.
This whole MIT thing is a perfect example of the "lalala, I'm not touching you!" approach to the existing laws. These MIT folks are working up to the letter of the law, but raping its spirit. Maybe the laws are too vague, but stunts like this will surely rectify that...
``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.
"Winstein's conclusion was based on the high expense of CD jukeboxes with computer interfaces, because at that time, no solution existed for gluing inexpensive consumer audio jukeboxes to computers -- a situation that changed with the advent of the StreetFire Sound RBX1600."
Guess they never heard of the Slink-e, which has been around for more than 6 years. In fact, it's so old it was just discontinued a couple months ago!
http://www.nirvis.com/slink-e.htm
Sure, it doesn't handle the audio side, but that's pretty trivial to do.
I don't like the RIAA either but just because you don't like them doesn't give you a reason to steal music.
Is it OK to steal a loaf of bread to feed my starving family? Should it then be OK to steal music to entertain my boring family?
"Freedom of speech has always been the abstract red-headed stepchild of the Constitution"
-Suck
..a technological method to easily make a copy of my loaf of bread, so that you could have one and I would still have mine, sure, go ahead and make a copy of my bread--I would still have mine then, it wouldn't have been stolen.
The "industry" has enthusiastically embraced copying technology-for themselves. They get to "sell" over and over again the same thing. No additional work required. They want to have an exclusive lock on not only content, but on your use of advancing technology. They lobbied and got passed laws that give them an even longer copyright period then what we had before, for no reason other than to continue selling the same content.
In the rest of the world, more money has to come from more work, with the copyright monopolists they want to work once, profit forever and ever and a day and a night and another day. Actually, it's worse than that, the non producers in the copyright monopoly world are the ones making most of the profit, they even screw their own actual content producers most of the time.
They are wickedly over paid middleman skimmers basically, who want to keep a lock on technological and societal progress. We arer at the point now where it is no longer necessary to even have these middleman industries for the most part, they see that, technology has made that rerality, so in order to hang onto their cash cow which has been highly lucrative for them in the past, they seek to further advance the laws only in their favor, no one else, either the actual content providers, nor the various end users, is really well survived by their actions any longer. Back when it took a huge amount of money and machines and expertise to make primitive copies-yes, they served a useful purpose and needed to be *fairly* compensated, but what happened is that while the cost of copying was dropping and the ease of copying was increasing, they kept insisting on the same or even more money for their service. They colluded to create and maintain what is called an industrial cartel, in the process several times running afoul of the law themselves. They did what cartels do, lobby to change the laws in their favor, and they kept on doing their illegal manipulations right along, just assuming (rightly so) that they could bear the cost of getting busted for illegalities as just a part of doing business, being corporations and organizxations, they have always had little to fear of actual human jail time.
In essence, they are just getting a little righteous payback. They know there is little left that reflects the necessity of most of their business existence. they seek to maintain their presence *despite* this. It is contentious now because we reached the obviousness of this, millions daily simply ignore the old paradigm of allowing them to maintain their monopoly on technology. IF they had evolved right along with technology and had continually dropped their prices to a fairer level and had made the obvious advantages of more modern technology equally available to their consumers, I doubt that people would have shoved back in their face as much.
This transition period is liable to continue for a while now, but inevitably they will have to concede that times have changed with their older business model. Those of them that do accept that *now* and evolve will prosper.
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.)
"Is it OK to steal a loaf of bread to feed my starving family? "
MIT bought and paid for its license, is fully within its license and is not doing anything outside the scope of what its paid for.
Is it OK for my family to eat the bread I bought?
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.
I think the question was always the extent of coverage their existing broadcast licenses gave them and how those licenses were to be interpreted in the light of digital vs. analog and wired vs. wireless transmissions.
Fair use is most often brought up with respect to my rights to do what I want with stuff that I buy within the boundaries of my own home, like format shift to use my favorite devices. No, "fair use" is not a cast-in-stone definition, and it's very weakly protected. We all know that perfectly well be now. But some of us believe that all "use" of copyrighted materials that does not involve redistribution should not fall under copyright legislation at all, and thus should be "unregulated" use. Do we always have to agree with current legislative or jurisprudential standards? And are we idiots if we think the courts and lawyers have mucked things up over the last few years over pure FUD spread by parts of the content industry?
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?