[1536] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
NYTimes.com Article: Music-Sharing Service at M.I.T. Is Shut Down
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (skip@MIT.EDU)
Mon Nov 3 10:11:39 2003
Errors-To: articles-email@ms1.lga2.nytimes.com
Date: Mon, 3 Nov 2003 09:39:09 -0500
Reply-To: skip@MIT.EDU
From: skip@MIT.EDU
To: MIT-Talk@MIT.EDU
This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by skip@mit.edu.
The better students get a distributing music, the more desperate the record industry becomes..?
--**Peter
skip@mit.edu
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Music-Sharing Service at M.I.T. Is Shut Down
November 3, 2003
By JOHN SCHWARTZ
It was hailed as ingenious: a way to listen to music on
demand while avoiding the legal battleground of file
sharing. Best of all, the music was fully licensed, so
there would be no legal trouble.
But it was not, and there is. On Friday, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology announced that it would temporarily
shut down its groundbreaking Library Access to Music System
until the licensing rights can be worked out.
The music service had its official start one week ago but
within hours, music companies, including the Universal
Music Group, complained that they had not granted - or been
paid for - the required legal permission to make the copies
of their songs used by the system.
The creators of the new service, M.I.T. students Keith
Winstein and Josh Mandel, were dumbfounded by the industry
move, since they had paid Loudeye, a company in Seattle, to
fill a hard drive with licensed songs. Mr. Winstein and Mr.
Mandel said that they thought the contract with the company
guaranteed that the copyright issues had been resolved.
"So far as I know, we bought this music fair and square,"
Mr. Winstein said.
He called the decision to suspend the service crushing, but
he hoped it would only be temporary.
"The prudent thing to do, the good faith thing to do, is to
take it down while we feel out where we stand," he said.
The music library idea is a clever blend of technology and
law. Its creators built the system within the school's
cable TV network; the analog TV network would, the students
thought, help sidestep the expensive and restrictive laws
and regulations that have grown up around the copying and
sharing digital copies of music.
It was supposed to resemble the analog world of radio, in
which stations pay performance fees to artists
representatives like the American Society of Composers,
Authors and Publishers but do not pay royalties to the
music labels. Because students could listen to the music
without making or trading copies, the system's creator
thought that they only had to make sure they had legally
purchased the music and would not require further payments
to the labels.
But the situation has swiftly devolved into a festival of
finger pointing. Universal Music Group, a division of
Vivendi Universal, issued a statement on Friday saying, "it
is unfortunate that M.I.T. launched a service in an attempt
to avoid paying recording artists, union musicians, and
record labels." Loudeye, the company said, "recognized that
they had no right to deliver Universal's music to the
M.I.T. service, and M.I.T. acted responsibly by removing
the music."
M.I.T., however, issued a statement on Friday that stressed
that the system "was designed to operate in full compliance
with the law and to respect the rights of all copyright
holders," and said that Loudeye had not made good on its
promises.
"We have been working with Loudeye on obtaining content
since October 2002 and Loudeye assured us on multiple
occasions that the content they provided to us was prepared
fully under authorization from the record labels and on
behalf of the publishers."
For its part, Loudeye seems to be claiming that M.I.T. had
misunderstood its contract. The company did not return
calls seeking comment, but a spokesman told The Los Angeles
Times, which first reported the conflict, "We provided
content to M.I.T.," but "we did not provide licenses for
them to issue that content."
That would appear to contradict what the company had said
in a news release the day that the program started, which
referred to "approximately 48,000 licensed digital music
tracks.'' In the same Loudeye news release, the company
quoted Mr. Winstein as saying, "As far as we know, Loudeye
is the only company in the country with all the rights and
permissions in place to provide this service." That news
release has since been removed from Loudeye's Web site.
Getting the legal issues worked out was more complex than
the technical ones, Mr. Winstein said. In a paper about the
system that he wrote last May, he said that the M.I.T.
project raised issues that the industry licensing
organizations had never considered, even though they might
apply to radio as well. "We were not willing to purchase
recordings from Loudeye until we could receive permission
from the songwriters and music publishers," he wrote. They
approached the Harry Fox agency, which licenses music for
the National Music Publishers Association, about clearing
the rights. "Five months after first receiving our request
for a license to buy these CD's (on a hard disc) from
Loudeye, the Harry Fox Agency concluded that no license was
necessary. Four hours later, Harry Fox's New Media
Coordinator "called me back to say they had changed their
mind and decided Loudeye did need a license from them."
(The company did not respond to calls seeking comment.)
To Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Internet law at Harvard
and is a director of the university's Berkman Center for
Internet and Society, that incident shows that the world of
copyright has grown so arcane that even the major players
do not even understand it. "It doesn't seem that M.I.T. was
trying to steal anything, but rather to simply hew to the
letter of the law in an incredibly byzantine area," he
said. "Good faith and technical genius alone doesn't make
it work."
Now a whiff of conciliation albeit still a bit barbed, is
in the air, according to the Vivendi statement: "M.I.T. has
now contacted us and apparently recognizes its
responsibility to compensate creators for the use of their
works. Universal looks forward to discussing how to make
that possible."
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/03/technology/03mitt.html?ex=1068870348&ei=1&en=e8b38e8308af2726
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