M.I.T. Students Create New Music Sharing Service - P2P-Zone

JackSpratts · 27-10-03, 02:58 PM

John Schwartz

Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a system for sharing music within their campus community that they say can avoid the copyright battles that have pitted the music industry against many customers.

The students, Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, drew the idea for their campus-wide network from a blend of libraries and from radio. Their effort, the Libraries Access to Music Project, which is backed by M.I.T. and financed by research money from the Microsoft Corporation, will provide music from some 3,500 CD's through a novel source: the university's cable television network.

The students say the system, which they plan to officially announce today, falls within the time-honored licensing and royalty system under which the music industry allows broadcasters and others to play recordings for a public audience. Major music industry groups are reserving comment, while some legal experts say the M.I.T. system mainly demonstrates how unwieldy copyright laws have become. A novel approach to serving up music on demand from one of the nation's leading technical institutions is only fitting, admirers of the project say. The music industry's woes started on college campuses, where fast Internet connections and a population of music lovers with time on their hands sparked a file-sharing revolution.

"It's kind of brilliant," said Mike Godwin, the senior technology counsel at Public Knowledge, a policy group in Washington that focuses on intellectual property issues. If the legal theories hold up, he said, "they've sidestepped the stonewall that the music companies have tried to put up between campus users and music sharing."

Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science and engineering at M.I.T., called the system an imaginative approach that reflected the problem-solving sensibility of engineering at the university. "Everybody has gotten so wedged into entrenched positions that listening to music has to have something to do with file sharing," he said. The students' project shows "it doesn't have to be that way at all."

Mr. Winstein, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, described the result as "a new kind of library." He said he hoped it would be a legal alternative to file trading that infringes copyrights. "We certainly hope," he said, "that by having access to all this music immediately, on demand, any time you want, students would be less likely to break the law.'"

While listening to music through a television might seem odd, it is crucial to the M.I.T. plan. The quirk in the law that makes the system legal, Mr. Winstein said, has much to do with the difference between digital and analog technology. The advent of the digital age, with the possibility of perfect copies spread around the world with the click of a mouse, has spurred the entertainment industry to push for stronger restrictions on the distribution of digital works, and to be reluctant to license their recording catalogues to permit the distribution of music over the Internet.

So the M.I.T. system, using the analog campus cable system, simply bypasses the Internet and digital distribution, and takes advantage of the relatively less- restrictive licensing that the industry makes available to radio stations and others for the analog transmission.

The university, like many educational institutions, already has blanket licenses for the seemingly old-fashioned analog transmission of music from the organizations that represent the performance rights, including the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers or Ascap, the Broadcast Music Inc. or B.M.I., and Sesac, formerly the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers.

If that back-to-the-future solution seems overly complicated, blame copyright law and not M.I.T., said Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Internet law at Harvard and is a director of the university's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The most significant thing about the M.I.T. plan, he said, is just how complicated it has to be to fit within the odd boundaries of copyright law.

"It's almost an act of performance art," Mr. Zittrain said. Mr. Winstein, he said, has "arrayed the gerbils under the hood so it appears to meet the statutory requirement" - and has shown how badly the system of copyright needs sensible revamping.

Representatives of the recording industry, including the Recording Industry Association of America, Ascap and B.M.I., either declined to comment or did not return calls seeking comment.

Although the M.I.T. music could still be recorded by students and shared on the Internet, Professor Abelson said that the situation would be no different from recording songs from conventional FM broadcasts. The system provides music quality that listeners say is not quite as good as a CD on a home stereo but is better than FM radio.

M.I.T. students, faculty and staff can choose from 16 channels of music and can schedule 80-minute blocks of time to control a channel. The high-tech D.J. can select, rewind or fast-forward the songs via an Internet-based control panel. Mr. Winstein and Mr. Mandel created the collection of CD's after polling students.

Mr. Winstein said that the equipment cost about $10,000, and the music, which was bought through a company that provides music on hard drives for the radio industry, for about $25,000. Mr. Winstein said they were making the software available to other colleges.

Students have been using a test version for months, and Mr. Winstein said the system was still evolving. The prototype, for example, shows the name of the person who is programming whatever 80-minute block of music is playing. Mr. Winstein said he once received an e-mail message from a fellow student complimenting him on his choice of music (Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 8) and telling him "I'd like to get to know you better." She signed the note, "Sex depraved freshman."

Mr. Winstein, who has a girlfriend, politely declined the offer, and said he realized that he might need to add a feature that would let users control the system anonymously.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/technology/27mit.html

theknife · 27-10-03, 05:03 PM

fascinating story....

so anybody wanna guess how long will it take for:

a. the RIAA to mount a legal objection

b. the students to start ripping the incoming stream

prolly about 24 hours...

Mazer · 28-10-03, 09:49 AM

The fact that it's a server based leeching system makes me less than excited to hear about it, and the fact that it's analog just makes me feel sorry for them. An equipment upgrade could boost the analog quality to CD digital levels, at which point the RIAA would start lobying for the rules for analog broadcasts to be brought up to digital standards. But at its heart it's just an over-complicated web radio station. If it had been invented at any other school I would have believed that the system was designed by pre-law students, it isn't very innovative.

multi · 28-10-03, 12:23 PM

yeah im a little curious about M$ involment with anything like this....
analog quality on a optical fibre network..criminal.!

JackSpratts · 28-10-03, 02:35 PM

corporations are busily destroying the promise of digital communications by shunting users into their drm-laden digital gulags. it was only a matter of time before people responded to the threat of diminished usage rights by calling the media companies' bluff and making them put up or shut up. is the dmca and drm really a response to an alleged loss as a result of a shift to digital media or is it simply an excuse for media giants to grab even more control from users, control they've coveted for decades, since long before digital was conceived? if it's the former then the riaa/mpaa can't mind us using analog at all. as a matter of fact they'll welcome it. no more endless "perfect copies" etc destroying their businesses and taking from starving artists what few rancid scraps they've left to them. we used analogue in every fashion and facet for a hundred years and the record/radio/movie/book and tv companies prospered fabulously. however if it's what i suspect and the riaa and the mpaa are deliberately using the digital bogeymen to scare congress and the courts (and the schools and the parents and the churches and the girl scouts) to feed their bottomless greed then trying to silence this old fashioned idea for an analogue radio stream will starkly illuminate the media companies' duplicitous lip service and artist rights arguments for the lies that they are.

- js.

multi · 28-10-03, 06:58 PM

in some ways a lot of warmth in the sound was lost in the transition from analogue...theres nothing wrong with it really analoge being the sound of many great synthesizers and what comes out of guitar amps..ect..but still digital is the standard these days...and is what most stuff is recorded in..

Quote:

control they've coveted for decades

and the huge profits they made with the introduction of each new format...
eg.gramaphone to LP to cassette to CD

multi · 02-11-03, 03:09 PM

MIT has had to shut down its eyebrow-raising Library Access to Music Project (LAMP). The project has been overzealously heralded by some as a panacea to the problems of P2P on college campuses, as it purported to make thousands of songs freely available on the campus' cable TV network. The service made great use of the so-called "analog hole," ostensibly skirting US Copyright issues by broadcasting below-CD quality analog music to devices that could not easily be used by end users to capture music (e.g., TVs). The service looked completely legal, although cynics were quick to point out that entities such as the RIAA would likely wrangle it to the ground using whatever methods possible.

It turns out that the LAMP's fuel, as it were, was not "properly licensed" in the view of several recording labels. LAMP had purchased $30,000 is music in digital format from Loudeye, a Seattle-based company that specializes in encoding, management, and distribution of digital media. Loudeye was informed in recent days by recording industry representatives that the company does not have the legal right to provide its services to MIT under these circumstances. Apparently the contractual arrangements between Loudeye and the recoding industry were previously not well understood. MIT has stated that Loudeye had assured them multiple times over the past year that the proposed MIT usage of their encoded products would in fact be legal. Given the players in the game, it is likely that Loudeye was under the impression that they were legally capable of providing such services to MIT. That is, until the RIAA and friends had something to say about it. Now, however, Loudeye is saying very little. The LA Times has one executive pointing the finger at MIT:

"We provided content to MIT," Loudeye publicist Stan Raymond said. "We did not provide licenses for them to issue that content."

Originally MIT had planned on working out copyright deals with objecting parties, but it looks as though the avalanche has led them to stop the service entirely, at least for now. As usual, the denizens of the music industry are painting MIT as the villain here.

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."

MIT has stated that they remain committed to providing the LAMP legally. What's to stop LAMP and other similar services from going out and buying regular CDs, and encoding them manually? Certainly not common sense, but since when has common sense had anything to do with the music industry? from

JackSpratts · 02-11-03, 04:52 PM

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.

27-10-03, 02:58 PM	#1
JackSpratts Join Date: May 2001 Location: New England Posts: 10,016	M.I.T. Students Create New Music Sharing Service John Schwartz Two students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a system for sharing music within their campus community that they say can avoid the copyright battles that have pitted the music industry against many customers. The students, Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, drew the idea for their campus-wide network from a blend of libraries and from radio. Their effort, the Libraries Access to Music Project, which is backed by M.I.T. and financed by research money from the Microsoft Corporation, will provide music from some 3,500 CD's through a novel source: the university's cable television network. The students say the system, which they plan to officially announce today, falls within the time-honored licensing and royalty system under which the music industry allows broadcasters and others to play recordings for a public audience. Major music industry groups are reserving comment, while some legal experts say the M.I.T. system mainly demonstrates how unwieldy copyright laws have become. A novel approach to serving up music on demand from one of the nation's leading technical institutions is only fitting, admirers of the project say. The music industry's woes started on college campuses, where fast Internet connections and a population of music lovers with time on their hands sparked a file-sharing revolution. "It's kind of brilliant," said Mike Godwin, the senior technology counsel at Public Knowledge, a policy group in Washington that focuses on intellectual property issues. If the legal theories hold up, he said, "they've sidestepped the stonewall that the music companies have tried to put up between campus users and music sharing." Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science and engineering at M.I.T., called the system an imaginative approach that reflected the problem-solving sensibility of engineering at the university. "Everybody has gotten so wedged into entrenched positions that listening to music has to have something to do with file sharing," he said. The students' project shows "it doesn't have to be that way at all." Mr. Winstein, a graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science, described the result as "a new kind of library." He said he hoped it would be a legal alternative to file trading that infringes copyrights. "We certainly hope," he said, "that by having access to all this music immediately, on demand, any time you want, students would be less likely to break the law.'" While listening to music through a television might seem odd, it is crucial to the M.I.T. plan. The quirk in the law that makes the system legal, Mr. Winstein said, has much to do with the difference between digital and analog technology. The advent of the digital age, with the possibility of perfect copies spread around the world with the click of a mouse, has spurred the entertainment industry to push for stronger restrictions on the distribution of digital works, and to be reluctant to license their recording catalogues to permit the distribution of music over the Internet. So the M.I.T. system, using the analog campus cable system, simply bypasses the Internet and digital distribution, and takes advantage of the relatively less- restrictive licensing that the industry makes available to radio stations and others for the analog transmission. The university, like many educational institutions, already has blanket licenses for the seemingly old-fashioned analog transmission of music from the organizations that represent the performance rights, including the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers or Ascap, the Broadcast Music Inc. or B.M.I., and Sesac, formerly the Society of European Stage Authors and Composers. If that back-to-the-future solution seems overly complicated, blame copyright law and not M.I.T., said Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Internet law at Harvard and is a director of the university's Berkman Center for Internet and Society. The most significant thing about the M.I.T. plan, he said, is just how complicated it has to be to fit within the odd boundaries of copyright law. "It's almost an act of performance art," Mr. Zittrain said. Mr. Winstein, he said, has "arrayed the gerbils under the hood so it appears to meet the statutory requirement" - and has shown how badly the system of copyright needs sensible revamping. Representatives of the recording industry, including the Recording Industry Association of America, Ascap and B.M.I., either declined to comment or did not return calls seeking comment. Although the M.I.T. music could still be recorded by students and shared on the Internet, Professor Abelson said that the situation would be no different from recording songs from conventional FM broadcasts. The system provides music quality that listeners say is not quite as good as a CD on a home stereo but is better than FM radio. M.I.T. students, faculty and staff can choose from 16 channels of music and can schedule 80-minute blocks of time to control a channel. The high-tech D.J. can select, rewind or fast-forward the songs via an Internet-based control panel. Mr. Winstein and Mr. Mandel created the collection of CD's after polling students. Mr. Winstein said that the equipment cost about $10,000, and the music, which was bought through a company that provides music on hard drives for the radio industry, for about $25,000. Mr. Winstein said they were making the software available to other colleges. Students have been using a test version for months, and Mr. Winstein said the system was still evolving. The prototype, for example, shows the name of the person who is programming whatever 80-minute block of music is playing. Mr. Winstein said he once received an e-mail message from a fellow student complimenting him on his choice of music (Antonin Dvorak's Symphony No. 8) and telling him "I'd like to get to know you better." She signed the note, "Sex depraved freshman." Mr. Winstein, who has a girlfriend, politely declined the offer, and said he realized that he might need to add a feature that would let users control the system anonymously. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/technology/27mit.html

28-10-03, 09:49 AM	#3
Mazer Earthbound misfit Join Date: May 2001 Location: Moses Lake, Washington Posts: 2,563	Microsoft Institute of Technocracy The fact that it's a server based leeching system makes me less than excited to hear about it, and the fact that it's analog just makes me feel sorry for them. An equipment upgrade could boost the analog quality to CD digital levels, at which point the RIAA would start lobying for the rules for analog broadcasts to be brought up to digital standards. But at its heart it's just an over-complicated web radio station. If it had been invented at any other school I would have believed that the system was designed by pre-law students, it isn't very innovative.

28-10-03, 12:23 PM	#4
multi Thanks for being with arse Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: The other side of the world Posts: 10,343	lol,theknife...you forgot: c. both of the above yeah im a little curious about M$ involment with anything like this.... analog quality on a optical fibre network..criminal.! __________________ i beat the internet - the end boss is hard Secret Temple of It

02-11-03, 03:09 PM	#7
multi Thanks for being with arse Join Date: Jan 2002 Location: The other side of the world Posts: 10,343	MIT's LAMP music network shut down over licensing issues MIT has had to shut down its eyebrow-raising Library Access to Music Project (LAMP). The project has been overzealously heralded by some as a panacea to the problems of P2P on college campuses, as it purported to make thousands of songs freely available on the campus' cable TV network. The service made great use of the so-called "analog hole," ostensibly skirting US Copyright issues by broadcasting below-CD quality analog music to devices that could not easily be used by end users to capture music (e.g., TVs). The service looked completely legal, although cynics were quick to point out that entities such as the RIAA would likely wrangle it to the ground using whatever methods possible. It turns out that the LAMP's fuel, as it were, was not "properly licensed" in the view of several recording labels. LAMP had purchased $30,000 is music in digital format from Loudeye, a Seattle-based company that specializes in encoding, management, and distribution of digital media. Loudeye was informed in recent days by recording industry representatives that the company does not have the legal right to provide its services to MIT under these circumstances. Apparently the contractual arrangements between Loudeye and the recoding industry were previously not well understood. MIT has stated that Loudeye had assured them multiple times over the past year that the proposed MIT usage of their encoded products would in fact be legal. Given the players in the game, it is likely that Loudeye was under the impression that they were legally capable of providing such services to MIT. That is, until the RIAA and friends had something to say about it. Now, however, Loudeye is saying very little. The LA Times has one executive pointing the finger at MIT: "We provided content to MIT," Loudeye publicist Stan Raymond said. "We did not provide licenses for them to issue that content." Originally MIT had planned on working out copyright deals with objecting parties, but it looks as though the avalanche has led them to stop the service entirely, at least for now. As usual, the denizens of the music industry are painting MIT as the villain here. 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." MIT has stated that they remain committed to providing the LAMP legally. What's to stop LAMP and other similar services from going out and buying regular CDs, and encoding them manually? Certainly not common sense, but since when has common sense had anything to do with the music industry? from __________________ i beat the internet - the end boss is hard Secret Temple of It

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27-10-03, 05:03 PM	#2
theknife my name is Ranking Fullstop Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Promontorium Tremendum Posts: 4,391	fascinating story.... so anybody wanna guess how long will it take for: a. the RIAA to mount a legal objection b. the students to start ripping the incoming stream prolly about 24 hours...

28-10-03, 02:35 PM	#5
JackSpratts Join Date: May 2001 Location: New England Posts: 10,016	corporations are busily destroying the promise of digital communications by shunting users into their drm-laden digital gulags. it was only a matter of time before people responded to the threat of diminished usage rights by calling the media companies' bluff and making them put up or shut up. is the dmca and drm really a response to an alleged loss as a result of a shift to digital media or is it simply an excuse for media giants to grab even more control from users, control they've coveted for decades, since long before digital was conceived? if it's the former then the riaa/mpaa can't mind us using analog at all. as a matter of fact they'll welcome it. no more endless "perfect copies" etc destroying their businesses and taking from starving artists what few rancid scraps they've left to them. we used analogue in every fashion and facet for a hundred years and the record/radio/movie/book and tv companies prospered fabulously. however if it's what i suspect and the riaa and the mpaa are deliberately using the digital bogeymen to scare congress and the courts (and the schools and the parents and the churches and the girl scouts) to feed their bottomless greed then trying to silence this old fashioned idea for an analogue radio stream will starkly illuminate the media companies' duplicitous lip service and artist rights arguments for the lies that they are. - js.

02-11-03, 04:52 PM	#8
JackSpratts Join Date: May 2001 Location: New England Posts: 10,016	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.