the whole loudeye thing was a bit strange to begin with i thought and would make things unnecessarily complicated legally. i would never have done it that way if they’d consulted me. normally a university would hand off ripping chores to the media dept, the same folks who run the campus tv and radio stations. each student would have an assignment to do say a hundred titles - or a thousand if the software's robust enough. end of story.
conversely the media dept buys a few hundred cd jukeboxes and slaves them together, avoiding the whole copying issue altogether. what's left is an automated analog radio station that takes requests. if anybody reading this still listens to over the air music radio, you're familiar with the concept and the execution - it's what the majority of todays stations do. what’s important about this is the licensing aspect. it covers everything, it’s a mechanical – you don’t negotiate it, you pay the publishing fee based on frequency and
as long as you pay the fee, nobody can stop you from transmitting. american radio is well covered by law in this regard, going back some 70 years.
for whatever reason (probably time) mit choose to hand off the encoding to another company, but copying is legal. automated stations normally copy the entire format for easier broadcasting. they used to copy the songs onto giant reels of tape on 2 separate machines. as a song was ending on player “A” a new song would start on player “B,” providing the overlap that simulated a real dj’s segue. previous to that huge acetate platters held the content. copying songs for automated play is a common – and legal – radio practice, i know of no station that doesn’t do it. so with loudeye acting as proxy for mit what they did was legal too. but as i wrote in
this weeks’ wir it ain't about legalities, it's about power, and it's about control, and this one is just too hot for the riaa pass up, even if they don't have a shred of law to back them up.
- js.