[1526] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
NYTimes.com Article: With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?
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Mon Oct 27 10:54:30 2003
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Date: Mon, 27 Oct 2003 10:03:40 -0500
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With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?
October 27, 2003
By 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?ex=1068267020&ei=1&en=cd9dce59e26e4856
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