Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel may soon be the most popular guys on campus. They say they've discovered a way to give their fellow students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and elsewhere dorm-room access to a huge music library without having to worry about getting slapped with a lawsuit from the recording industry.
The pair were scheduled yesterday to debut a system they've built that lets MIT students listen for free to 3,500 CDs over the school's cable television network. They say it's completely kosher under copyright law.
The students will share the software with other schools, who they say could operate their own networks for just a few thousand dollars per year. They call that a small price to pay for heading off lawsuits like those the recording industry filed against hundreds of alleged illegal file-swappers.
Here's the catch: The system is operated over the Internet but the music is pumped through MIT's cable television network. That makes it an analog transmission, as opposed to a digital one, in which a file is reproduced exactly.
The downside is the sound quality: better than FM radio, but not as good as a CD.
But the upside is that because the copy isn't exact, the licensing hurdles are lower. The idea piggybacks on two things: the broad, cheap licenses given to many universities to "perform" analog music, and the same rules that require radio stations to pay songwriters, but not record companies, to broadcast songs.
It also can broadcast any CD -- even ones by popular artists like Madonna and the Beatles who have resisted making their songs available even to legal digital download services.
"I think it's fascinating. As a copyright lawyer, I think they've managed to thread the needle," said Fred Von Lohmann, a lawyer for the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation.
"They've basically managed to cut the record labels out of the equation altogether," he said.
Conceivably, the system could be replicated by the cable system of a city or town, the students said.
But it seems ideally suited for universities, which often operate internal cable networks, and already have these broad performance licenses. College students are among the most enthusiastic file-swappers, and universities are exploring ways, such as fee-based systems, to give their students legal access to music.
The MIT project is called "Library Access to Music," or "LAMP," and here's how it works: Users go to a Web page and "check out" one of 16 cable channels in the MIT system, which they can control for up to 80 minutes. The controller then picks songs from among 3,500 CDs -- all suggested by students in an online survey over the past year -- that Winstein, 22, and Mandel, 20, have compiled.
The music is then pumped into the user's room on that channel and played through a TV, a laptop with an audio jack or external speakers.
Only one person controls each channel at a time, but anyone can listen in. Anyone can also see on another channel what selections are playing and the usernames of the controllers (Winstein acknowledges potential privacy concerns, but there are upsides: He once got a romantic proposition from a user who admired his taste for Stravinsky).
If all 16 channels regularly fill up, MIT could make more available for a few hundred dollars each. Users can listen to, but not store, the music.
The students built the system using part of US$25 million grant to MIT from Microsoft Corp, some of which was set aside for student projects.
"We still wanted to do it over the Internet, but MIT's lawyers were not willing to chance that," Winstein said.
Their solution required navigating an alphabet soup of licensing groups. A big challenge was confronting two sets of copyrights: those held by the songwriters on the songs, and those held by record labels on the recordings of the songs. Under the latter, it wasn't clear MIT could simply make available the thousands of CDs MIT already owns in its library.
Instead, the students waited for the National Music Publishers Association's licensing arm to authorize a Seattle company called Loudeye to sell the students MP3s of the 3,500 CDs their fellow students had suggested. The students then paid Loudeye US$8 per CD for the MP3s (they plan to expand the collection as students request more music).
A spokesman for the Recording Industry Association of America, Jonathan Lamy, was provided with a description of the project and, after consulting with RIAA colleagues, declined comment on it.
The students say that because they've done the licensing legwork, other schools could easily follow. All it would take is about US$40,000 to cover hardware and a CD collection.
Von Lohmann said that if record labels would grant blanket licenses, as songwriters have, systems like MIT's could handle digital music and solve the peer-to-peer controversy.
"The students get access to a broad array of music, and the copyright owners get paid. This is where we should all be heading," Von Lohmann said. "I hope the record industry takes note and realizes this is a whole lot more promising than suing people."
EUROPEAN TARGETS: The planned Munich center would support TSMC’s European customers to design high-performance, energy-efficient chips, an executive said Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), the world’s largest contract chipmaker, yesterday said that it plans to launch a new research-and-development (R&D) center in Munich, Germany, next quarter to assist customers with chip design. TSMC Europe president Paul de Bot made the announcement during a technology symposium in Amsterdam on Tuesday, the chipmaker said. The new Munich center would be the firm’s first chip designing center in Europe, it said. The chipmaker has set up a major R&D center at its base of operations in Hsinchu and plans to create a new one in the US to provide services for major US customers,
‘ABUSE OF POWER’: Lee Chun-yi allegedly used a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a pet grooming salon and take his wife to restaurants, media reports said Control Yuan Secretary-General Lee Chun-yi (李俊俋) resigned on Sunday night, admitting that he had misused a government vehicle, as reported by the media. Control Yuan Vice President Lee Hung-chun (李鴻鈞) yesterday apologized to the public over the issue. The watchdog body would follow up on similar accusations made by the Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) and would investigate the alleged misuse of government vehicles by three other Control Yuan members: Su Li-chiung (蘇麗瓊), Lin Yu-jung (林郁容) and Wang Jung-chang (王榮璋), Lee Hung-chun said. Lee Chun-yi in a statement apologized for using a Control Yuan vehicle to transport his dog to a
BEIJING’S ‘PAWN’: ‘We, as Chinese, should never forget our roots, history, culture,’ Want Want Holdings general manager Tsai Wang-ting said at a summit in China The Mainland Affairs Council (MAC) yesterday condemned Want Want China Times Media Group (旺旺中時媒體集團) for making comments at the Cross-Strait Chinese Culture Summit that it said have damaged Taiwan’s sovereignty, adding that it would investigate if the group had colluded with China in the matter and contravened cross-strait regulations. The council issued a statement after Want Want Holdings (旺旺集團有限公司) general manager Tsai Wang-ting (蔡旺庭), the third son of the group’s founder, Tsai Eng-meng (蔡衍明), said at the summit last week that the group originated in “Chinese Taiwan,” and has developed and prospered in “the motherland.” “We, as Chinese, should never
‘A SURVIVAL QUESTION’: US officials have been urging the opposition KMT and TPP not to block defense spending, especially the special defense budget, an official said The US plans to ramp up weapons sales to Taiwan to a level exceeding US President Donald Trump’s first term as part of an effort to deter China as it intensifies military pressure on the nation, two US officials said on condition of anonymity. If US arms sales do accelerate, it could ease worries about the extent of Trump’s commitment to Taiwan. It would also add new friction to the tense US-China relationship. The officials said they expect US approvals for weapons sales to Taiwan over the next four years to surpass those in Trump’s first term, with one of them saying
RSS