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Music Media The Almighty Buck

MIT's Music Net Shut Down Over License Issues 139

Posted by CowboyNeal from the easy-come-easy-go dept.
aurum42 writes "MIT's LAMP music-over-cable initiative has been shut down due to licensing concerns, as reported on The Boston Globe. Ars Technica has a good summary of the story. It appears that Loudeye did not have the rights to sell music to MIT for distribution over cable, although they apparently assured MIT that they did in fact have those rights. Murky, unexplored legal quagmire or RIAA influenced revisionism?"
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MIT's Music Net Shut Down Over License Issues More

MIT's Music Net Shut Down Over License Issues

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  • MIT have a case? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by NightWulf ( 672561 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @04:47PM (#7367989)
    Does MIT have a case to sue Loudeye? Seems Loudeye misrepresented themselves. It may be better/easier if MIT simply works in partnership with an organization that does has a lot of agreements with the music industry already, like Apple or such. Maybe an MIT branded iTunes?

    • RIAA vs MIT (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Davak ( 526912 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @04:54PM (#7368014) Homepage
      RIAA sees this as a direct attack against them. This is a counterstrike:
      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."

      The RIAA here is directly charging MIT with trying to break copyright. There are not suggesting that MIT made a mistake... or that Loudeye misrepresented itself.
      The RIAA is trying to make an example out of MIT.

      • Re:RIAA vs MIT (Score:3, Funny)

        by metlin ( 258108 )
        The RIAA is trying to make an example out of MIT

        Wrong school to pick! Oh wait, that would be Harvard Law school ;-)

      • Re:RIAA vs MIT (Score:4, Insightful)

        by YanceyAI ( 192279 ) * <IAMYANCEY@yahoo.com> on Saturday November 01, 2003 @05:10PM (#7368092)
        Funny that they see MIT's attempt to find a legal solution to providing students with content as an attempt to circumvent the RIAA. From the LAMP Site:

        LAMP was designed to operate in full compliance with the law and to respect the rights of all copyright holders. MIT has at all times sought to implement a legal music service for its students.

        • Re:RIAA vs MIT (Score:2, Insightful)

          by FemmyV ( 720873 )
          RIAA won't like this because if other stations follow MIT's lead, people in the labels' marketing departments won't have campus radio station Program and Music directors to target to get stuff played. Instead, it will be every student who has access to the system, and that's a LOT of phone calls to make and concert tickets to arrange. The cable system as a distribution source, like P2P, completely circumvents the labels' promotions budgets. Brilliant!
      • Why do I have the sinking feeling that the RIAA recycled one of their trite media responses, crossing off 12-year-old Brianna's name and replacing it with MIT's?

        Come to think of it, both Brianna's mom and MIT thought they were getting file-sharing services which were RIAA-compliant.

        Hmmmm.....

      • Re:RIAA vs MIT (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        It seems more like a radio station that accepts requests than a file sharing service like Kazaa. They just automate the DJ middleman and broadcast over a different medium. The nature of the service is obviously not meant to bypass copyrights. In fact, its the complete opposite, meant to give MIT students a legal alternative to Kazaa and such. Would it hurt the RIAA that much to try to HELP MIT in its own effort to curb copyright infringement instead of being asses about it?
    • Street vendor sells me car stereo, and repeatedly assures me it is his stereo to sell. Murky, unexplored legal quagmire or RIAA influenced revisionism?
    • Loudeye may have misrepresented the permissions on the music they owned. It appears that Loudeye has a very large collection of music that they have licecensed for streaming over the web. It also appears that Loudeye was in serious financial trouble at the time that they started negotiating with MIT. They may have seen the MIT deal as a way to open up a new market for their library.

      The problem is that MIT was not going steam the music over the web, they were going to stream it over cable television. T

      • One wonders why MIT did not acquire the rights to play the music from one of the music clearing houses instead of going to a digital streaming company. The whole point of this exercise, after all, was to not stream music over the web. The music may originate from a computer, and I think this is the norm for many radio stations, but it is broadcast over cable.

        MIT has properly the acquired the rights to broadcast music from ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC. The problem appears that Loudeye did not have the right to

    • in soviet russia, loudeye hears you!

    • Re:MIT have a case? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Where do you think Apple got its files from? Loudeye!

      I'd have thought it was up to MIT to set up deals with the labels, not Loudeye. All they do is rip the CD's, do data entry stuff, encode them and ship them.

  • Is it just me (Score:5, Funny)

    by jlechem ( 613317 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @04:48PM (#7367993) Homepage Journal

    or doesn't MIT usually let these kinds of things go. I mean come on they're the College who have a subdomain called fuck-the-skull-of-jesus.mit.edu [mit.edu]. I really hope the RIAA hasn't managed to actually influence them in any way.

    • according to mit's database, that machine is registered and run by a student living on-campus, so its existence has no bearing on what the administration feels or will do. they aren't stupid enough to willfully ignore the law if, in fact, the LAMP project is illegal.
      • Although it should be noted that this individual student almost certainly does not have any control over the DNS, so the naming of the machine must have had co-operation from the IT Powers That Be at MIT.

        • Re:Is it just me (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          MIT students get to choose their own hostnames.

          As you might imagine, they get pretty interesting.

        • Re:Is it just me (Score:1, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          No, the student very much has control over the hostname. They can change it to whatever they choose - we do not censor hostnames, except in extreme circumstances, or when they break the world (like localhost.mit.edu).

    • Re:Is it just me (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Crap! Slashdot has a subdomain like that too! [slashdot.org]

    • Going to MIT, and having the power to assign these domains to people's computers, you would be surprised at the kind of stuff that gets through. MIT administration really has nothing to do with it. If a sub-domain has not been previously registered, then someone can claim it. About the only thing that wouldn't get through usually is a racist name or slang. But the bottom line is that MIT really doesn't see every computer name that goes through the system and I really don't think they care. That is one

    • Re:Is it just me (Score:3, Interesting)

      by firedancer414 ( 460782 )
      I don't know, I'm here at MIT, and the response to both the inception of LAMP and its destruction was extremely apathetic. A whole bunch of people I know used it once for the novelty ("Hey, that's kinda cool.") and went back to their machines in their rooms and played _their_ music. It was frustrating; I think there were 16 channels? It was more like an all request radio station than an MP3 player, so you had to listen to everyone else's crappy music, too.

      I can't say much about us taking it personally;

  • Why lawyers suck (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Davak ( 526912 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @04:49PM (#7368001) Homepage
    1. MIT found a way to "get around" the system using the analog hole.
    2. RIAA picked holes in contracts until they could close down MIT's system.

    Nothing new here. RIAA is still evil.

    • Re:Why lawyers suck (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ldecours ( 703865 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @06:02PM (#7368289)
      It's just a campus CCTV channel with network-controlled programming. My school has been doing this for years, I'm confident that many schools have this configuration.

      If they hadn't hyped this up as some kind of RIAA work-around, it'd still be running.

      Also, when you're a campus radio or television station, you shouldn't have to buy your music. You should receive it in the mail for free, and for the purpose of broadcasting.

    • Re:Why lawyers suck (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      If you're about to buy something valuable,
      like a house, it's part of your due diligence
      to make sure the person selling the item
      actually owns it. You can do this the dumb
      way, by asking them if they own it (which MIT
      did), or you can demand proof, do a background
      check, title search, or similar MINIMAL
      investigation.

      Had MIT asked for the company's contract with
      the RIAA, they could have reviewed things
      directly. Heck, they even could have approached
      the RIAA and asked them what they thought.

      So, while lawyers do

  • Like this is going to stop them... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gothic_Walrus ( 692125 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @04:53PM (#7368013) Journal
    Let's face it: streaming music is nice (and better for the record labels), but it's not the only way to hear it for free.

    How to now get free music? There are more than enough geeky MIT students to find a solution to the problem. MIT-only file sharing? Passing around burned copies of CDs? Having everyone switch to using Kazaa? All I know is that something new will show up sooner or later to replace LAMP.

    Taking away music from college students won't do anything but make them mad. If this was the RIAA's doing, they've just screwed themselves. Dealing with a few bitter music fans is bad enough; a college campus full could be their undoing...

    • Re:Like this is going to stop them... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by pvt_medic ( 715692 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @04:57PM (#7368032)
      Agreed, the last thing anyone should want is a bunch of MIT students upset with you. I mean why dont you think they dont crack down on the drinking problem there. It keeps the students happy. Besides when the RIAA shut down Napster how many alternatives sprung up to replace it. Music sharing is the new generation. With the demise of one system, will only spawn new ones. The key is the RIAA needs to embrace technology or they will be washed away from the wave of change.

    • Re:Like this is going to stop them... (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Dealing with a few bitter music fans is bad enough; a college campus full could be their undoing...

      Not any college campus, a bunch of pissed off MIT nerds isn't my idea of fun :)

      ~metlin

    • Re:Like this is going to stop them... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @05:14PM (#7368103) Homepage Journal
      "How to now get free music? There are more than enough geeky MIT students to find a solution to the problem. MIT-only file sharing? Passing around burned copies of CDs? Having everyone switch to using Kazaa? All I know is that something new will show up sooner or later to replace LAMP. "

      There's expressed demand here. People are saying "we want compressed music we can put on portable devices, we want individual tracks as opposed to complete albums, and we want to be charged reasonably for it." Since the RIAA isn't responding to supply and demand (Why should they? They're an oligopoly!) they won't provide these. The result? The people find their own way to get what they want. This didn't happen overnight. It started way back in 96-97. It really din't become a 'let the cat out of the bag' situation until Napster was sued. Oops RIAA, good job.

      The RIAA really fouled up here. They forced people to solve their own distribution problems, and now they have to face the very real possibility that their customers are so independent delivery-wise that the RIAA is not as necessary for an artist to become popular.

      Double oops, RIAA.

      There are quite a few people here that think this whole music thing is about getting music for free. There are bound to be cases where it is true, but in the vast majority of cases it's not even close to being the only factor. Once the RIAA figures this out, assuming it's not too late, they'll be able to provide the services these people want instead of butting heads with places like MIT.

      Hey RIAA, how about fulfilling consumer demand? Ya make more money that way than with lawsuits.

      • we want individual tracks as opposed to complete albums,

        I would be so happy if the facts in this case supported that argument. According to the LAMP website, 9 out of the top 10 songs played this week are from the same Coldplay album (however long that 'week' actually represents...).

        From this I would suggest that music buyers want good music, be it in album or single form. However, in the absence of good music they will listen to any old trash with minimum clothing. The music labels know this and stri

        • That you believe that, if Coldplay started stripping, it would increase their marketability amongst MIT students!

          As far as I know, Coldplay have never stripped publicly, for the purposes of advertising or otherwise, and I would like to take this opportunity to respectfully request that they never do so.
      • Thing is, the RIAA liked it when everything had to be purchased in fluffed-up overpriced batches. It guaranteed them a steady stream of income. They didn't want anything to happen to the status quo. Fortunately, something did happen. Napster became popular, and online music filesharing was unleashed upon the world. The RIAA got Napster shut down, and a swarm of hardier replacements appeared out of the ether. Now some for-pay online music services are stepping into the sun, and we're seeing a change. People
      • trying to sue every new attempt that MIT students come up with.
    • One way to get free music is irate [sourceforge.net]. This only provides music for which the copyright owner allows free download.
    • The thing is, this wasn't free music. MIT was actually trying to pay for music, and the RIAA stopped them. People won't be pissed off about it, but it won't encourage them to buy CDs, either.

      I suspect it won't be too long before Congress realized that the RIAA is a bunch of foriegn companies using dodgy interpretations of copyright law to screw over American consumers and artists, and outlaws their business model. In the meantime, I'll be buying my music from people who are willing to sell it to me [magnatune.com].
    • Lawyers can defend even acknowledged ruthless child serial killers, so complaining about their defence of the music studios is pointless; it's in the nature of legal argument to ignore all arguments against one's position and only focus on supportive ones, so the RIAA lawyers are deaf by design, by training. Likewise, the studios are doing as required by law in defending the income of their shareholders, so the most one can really complain about is the lack of vision of their executives. If you really wa

  • Neither (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Murky, unexplored legal quagmire or RIAA influenced revisionism?

    Neither. Crystal-clear matter of law, rightly dispensed with. If you do not own rights to the music, you may not distribute the music. Pretty freakin' clear, that.

  • How much of this was their CNBC interview I wonder (Score:4, Insightful)

    by HiyaPower ( 131263 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @04:58PM (#7368038)
    The Lamp folks appeared on CNBC on friday talking about this. They also said that the software was up at www.mit.edu under one of the freeware licenses. I dare say that if it had just stayed on campus, it may have flown under the RIAA's radar. As it was, somebody felt they had to shut it down before everyone else in the world did it. jmo.
  • Since you're not signing any contract when you copy the music, there wouldn't be a problem here. The music would play and people would be happy.
  • But we told you so!

    (-1, Redundant, blah blah blah [come on, get me, I have karma to burn (No, Really, go for it)])

  • What???? (Score:2, Funny)

    by armando_wall ( 714879 )
    MIT Music is down?????

    I don't wanna go back to FM Radio or listening to CDs!!

  • Excuse me... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by moehoward ( 668736 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @05:12PM (#7368100)
    Why, again, do the slashdot editors seem to imply that college students should have free access to commercial free music? For god's sake, if you are going to go communist for college students, why not just imply that college students should get a free education, room, and board?

    I don't get it.

    So, Loudeye had some dimwitted salesperson with a big mouth. Shocking. Just shocking.

    • Re:Excuse me... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      What's wrong with a free education? Obviously if more people were educated then you'd have less dimwitted salespersons to poke fingers at. Besides, you've got a real poor understanding of communism if you think free monopolistic-busting music access would suddenly turn the US into something that Lenin would be fond of. You'd need huge corporate cartels controlling all media access and invasive laws that allowed the government to arrest anyone without judicial review.

      Oh wait, I guess we're farther along tha

    • For gods sake? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      " Why, again, do the slashdot editors seem to imply that college students should have free access to commercial free music? "

      Why do people think a performance of music is worth more than the air that carries it?

      I certainly don't.

      The RIAA may disagree, but that seems to be their problem, not mine. After all, I think my time is worth a million dollars an hour. My job is practically stealing from me by paying me only $101,000 a year. Now if I could only get a law passed that said my company had to employ

    • Re:Excuse me... (Score:3, Informative)

      by heli0 ( 659560 )
      Free music?

      "LAMP had purchased $30,000 is music in digital format"

      The school paid for licenses for all of the music and then made it available in an analog format to its students.

    • Re:Excuse me... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by FemmyV ( 720873 )
      [i] Why, again, do the slashdot editors seem to imply that college students should have free access to commercial free music? [/i] Maybe because some of the $30,000 that paid for the library possibly came from the students own activity fees and therefore it's not free access?
    • Like Germany? And most of Europe, which has very low tuition at public universities...

    • Re:Excuse me... (Score:3, Informative)

      by dbarclay10 ( 70443 )

      Why, again, do the slashdot editors seem to imply that college students should have free access to commercial free music? For god's sake, if you are going to go communist for college students, why not just imply that college students should get a free education, room, and board?

      Read the fucking article, twit.

      The music wasn't free. MIT paid for it. That money came from tuition, donations, grants, and all sorts of things. (And before you say "donation money shouldn't be used ...", stop and consider tha

    • Re:Excuse me... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Fnkmaster ( 89084 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @06:54PM (#7368522)
      They paid for music, $30,000 worth of music, and played it back in an analog, targeted-delivery format (not broadcast to the public). No different than playing the music over the music channels on the machines at the gym, or broadcasting it over an ultra-low-power (campus-area only) radio station. The only difference as far as I can tell is that you took turns being the "DJ".


      If the company they licensed the 30k worth of music from didn't have the rights to license it under these terms, then that's hardly MIT's fault.

      • If the company they licensed the 30k worth of music from didn't have the rights to license it under these terms, then that's hardly MIT's fault.

        But that's the wonderful thing about copyright infringement...

        It may not be MIT's fault. They may have made an honest effort be fully legally compliant.

        But it doesn't matter.

        They are still fully liable.

        Copyright infringement is one of those wonderful "we don't care why you did it, we don't care that you thought you were legal, we don't care that you tried to act

    • I like the cut of your jib sir. I'm $25,000 down and still have at least two years left.
    • Um, whats wrong with a society that sets up its citizens with free education and living expenses associated with it?

  • UGH!! THE RIAA really needs to be brought down! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    They can't REALLY be blocking all of these mediums? What the heck are they trying to do here?

    Plus, look at what they've done to the quality of music. I don't know if anyone agrees, but most of what comes out is like BUBBLEGUM ROCK...nothing really new or orignal happening here, except on the indy labels that the RIAA don't touch.

    I hear more interesting music in downtown NY on a streetcorner than I do on the radio.

    THE RIAA is killing itself. It kindof reminds me of that Gene Roddenberry show EARTH: FIN

  • Why are we plagued by this childish behavior? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by JoeShmoe ( 90109 ) <askjoeshmoe@hotmail.com> on Saturday November 01, 2003 @05:21PM (#7368139)
    This is the same kind of crap that RIAA pulled on MP3.Com! Legally, I can buy a CD with music on it. Legally, I can encode a CD to MP3s and put them on my hard drive. Legally I can upload my MP3s from my hard drive to my remote server to listen to them at work, etc. I could probably even legally mail my CD to someone and hire them to encode it for me.

    But just because MP3.Com took it one logical step further and encoded their copy of your CD to elimiate shipping costs, they were found guilty of copyright infringement.

    Here we have an MIT setup where if they bought a bunch of CDs and hired a bunch of students to encode them it's legal, but if they just buy the already encoded songs, it's illegal. This kind of legal hair-splitting is such crap.

    I don't know if this is a situation where people need to grow some balls and actually stand up to these kind of logical quagmires or a case where courts are idiotic enough to buy such arguments. And while we are on the subject, it's worth pointing out that if I distribute music over coaxial cable I'm apparently fine but if I distribute over twisted pair, I'm aching for a lawsuit.

    And MPAA and RIAA wonder why people don't respect the laws about copyright...

    - JoeShmoe
    .
  • First of all the MIT system uses some of the systems of HAVARDNET which is a subsiderary of Microsoft. A lot of has to be due to big business relation to this and they are worry that the RIAA is going to sue them and MIT for copywright violation. So its from Coporate sponsership that this resulted in this shutdown of the cable service.
  • "Murky, unexplored legal quagmire or RIAA influenced revisionism?"

    No, this isn't a quagmire. It isn't unexplored legal territory. We've been reading about this for years. The lawyers have been interpreting and representing for existing laws surprisingly well. Pro bonos and non-sell outs are getting ready to form new rules that take many of the old rules into account. Competitive, P2P type music industry is just around the corner. Everyone wants it. The RIAA will apply maximum litigation wherever they think copyrights are being infringed. The RIAA hawks have done just about all the revising they can.

    Why did they shut down M.I.T.? It's a small group of supply-side elitists, aristocrats (bourgeoisie) and government oligarchs who don't want things to change. TOO BAD. The methods of delivering music mainstream are changing and for the better. This is a temporary setback and students, programmers, hackers etc. will find legitimate, copyright-compatible ways to deliver music sooner or later.

  • Maybe they should be more like us at WPI..... (Score:3, Informative)

    by Yenhsrav_Keviv ( 694947 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @05:35PM (#7368194)
    over here, we've had a network filesharing program for years. Early on stuff like kazaa and other p2p programs were banned, and well, we started using Gnucleus's Lan client. [gnucleus.com] Maybe they should do the same if they already haven't.

  • Legal or technical solutions first/best? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wonder if the legal solutions to this latest RIAA shutdown will come sooner than the technical solutions. Would MIT officials and administrators put their lawyers on their tab and cut through the legal redtape for some music before some bored MIT students offer a fix or alternatives to LAMP? I'm betting that a RIAA-backed shut down of "music for students" is not a research priority to world-renown professors and big research grants but it's a big deal to the typical college students right? There's prob

  • common sense? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BeatdownGeek ( 687929 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @05:55PM (#7368261) Homepage
    What's to stop LAMP and other similar services from going out and buying regular CDs, and encoding them manually?
    Correct me if I'm wrong, but just because they buy the CD and encode it, doesn't mean they have the license rights to "broadcast" it over their network. Maybe I'm missing something here.

    Anybody?

    • Re:common sense? (Score:3, Informative)

      by tgibbs ( 83782 )

      Correct me if I'm wrong, but just because they buy the CD and encode it, doesn't mean they have the license rights to "broadcast" it over their network. Maybe I'm missing something here.

      MIT already has broadcast rights, bought and paid for. They've been broadcasting music from their campus radio station for years. The problem seems to be that the company that sold them the digital versions did not have the right to do so. But it sounds like MIT could simply buy the physical CDs and rip them.

  • Surprise! (Score:1, Troll)

    by Duncan3 ( 10537 )
    Turns out a couple college kids aren't smarter then the RIAA after all. I'm shocked, really. I'm sure they are too.

    But everyone here knew it couldn't last, only geeks are bored enough to work for free, musicians need money for drugs.

    They did however get enough fame out of it to last them a good long time. And that's what it's really all about in the business world. As long as you can get to the CNBC studio _before_ they shut you down, you're golden.

  • Turf War? (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 01, 2003 @06:06PM (#7368302)
    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.

    How dare they step on RIAA turf? Avoiding paying artists and union musicians has always been the job of the RIAA member labels!

    • How
      dare they step on RIAA turf? Avoiding paying artists and union musicians has always been the job of the RIAA member labels!
      I can't decide... Looking at the mods on this...

      Is this not really funny, because it is too true?

      Or is this funny because is is so true?

  • forget the loopholes (Score:5, Interesting)

    by bonds ( 701580 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @07:31PM (#7368653)
    We don't need newer and more creative ways to sidestep our poorly conceived IP laws, we need new laws.

    I for one would be grateful if places with clout, like MIT, would spend their resources advocating for better policy rather than engaging in legal contortions. If MIT, Harvard, Stanford, UC Berkeley, Princeton, Yale, NYU, etc. threw *serious* support behind good policy (like the Eldred act [eldred.cc], IMHO), the RIAA would find it much harder to have their way with congress. Admittedly, uniting these institutions of intellectual debate is much easier said than done, but they are uniquely equipped to put forth balanced proposals that address a broader social agenda than would ever emerge from an industry lobby. We could really use someone with the clout, resources, intelligence and neutrality of MIT to help write (and right) the rules of the game that are fair to *all* the stakeholders, not just the RIAA.

    What we are finding is that leaving the fox (the RIAA) to guard the hen-house (IP policy) is great for the fox and bad for everyone else.

  • Let me see if I understand... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by rmckeethen ( 130580 ) on Saturday November 01, 2003 @08:27PM (#7368912)

    If you read the press release [yahoo.com] from Loudeye it's clear that they knew exactly what MIT intended to do with their $30,000 purchase. Hell, Loudeye claims they are the only company authorized to arrange this type of licensing scheme for MIT. How can they turn around and claim now that MIT didn't ask them for the right kind of licenses? What, did Loudeye just forget to tell MIT about the problem? What did Loudeye's execs. expect would happen?

    But you've really got to love the quote from Vivendi;

    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."

    Now let me see if I understand this: I design a legal music service for college students. I contact a company that tells me they have music rights for sale, I buy them for $30,000 and then I start the service. But, less than a week later, a music label calls me on the carpet, claiming I 'avoided paying music artists, union musicians and record labels'? What was the $30,000 to Loudeye for then, if not a payment on behalf of recording artists, union musicians and recording labels? Did Vivendi not get their cut, miss the memo, what?

    It's beyond me why the music industry would want to shut down the LAMP service. I mean, as I understand it, it's more like a radio station than an MP3 download tool like Napster or Kazaa. Does this mean that the labels don't want college kids listening to music legally? Did radio-like venues become taboo or something while I slept? This debacle is sure to send one message clearly to students across the US - there is no way to stay legally compliant with the RIAA and still listen to music. Now, what's that message likely to encourage?

    • Most people imagined this system would be closed quickly. Changing Loudeye's contract was a really simple method and one I should have seen.

      What, did Loudeye just forget to tell MIT about the problem? What did Loudeye's execs. expect would happen?

      What you have witnessed is the death of a loophole. You have to imagine that the MIT super digital request play over traditional analog broadcast was legal a few weeks ago. The RIAA companies, being a racket, can change their terms at will They simply chang

  • Won't be long and everything will be illegal.

    You'll glance and a billboard and be microcharged.
    Dive by another car and hear a bit of their stereo and you'll pay.
    They inject it into your ears and eyes and it'll be illegal to refuse.

    Sick of lawyers.
    Sick of government.
    And I'm sick of you telling me that it's their right by law to do what they want.

  • Perhaps it's time to sick the SPA on their asses (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    And see just how legit the people working for the RIAA really are?

    I'm sure none of them are running illegal software, or have -any- MP3s, for that matter.

    Let's turn the tables on these assholes.
  • Back when I first heard about it, my immediate reaction was (and I quote, from a thread on another forum) "They underestimate the RIAA. They employ a lot of lawyers, they'll find a reason to sue them."

    My gut reaction was right.

    And they're stupid for pissing off MIT students. It's a really bad idea. They have to be really smart to get in, and they'll take this personally.
  • "MIT's LAMP music-over-cable initiative has been shut down due to licensing concerns,

    Is RIAA the single most criminal company in the US? What other company can sell things made by people that don't get paid for making them?

    Friends don't let friends by RIAA music. It's that simple.

    • Well I suppose you could point fingers at the shoe and apparel companies that run sweatshops. Those guys don't even have the little kids on MTV Cribs showing off their rental bling bling while they show off their street creds by introducing everyone from the orphanage.
    • What other company can sell things made by people that don't get paid for making them?

      I believe they are called SCO. (At least they think they can.) And if you're talking about physical goods, most clothing brands do (Nike for instance), but their workers live in the Philliphines, so they don't seem to count.

  • Long term (Score:2, Insightful)

    by viking80 ( 697716 )
    For thousands of years, musicians played directly for people, and there was no "intellectual property". The law reflected reality.

    Now RIAA have enjoyed a monopoly on recording equipment for nearly a century. Now that reality is over.
    The law does not reflect today reality, and must change. (A little pain in the process)

    Digitizing a performance is just like an open air concert: Everybody in the neigbourhood can hear it. Here the neigbourhood is the planet, and that is that.
  • The whole setup RI/MPAA is trying to establish is EVERY time you watch or listen you're supposed to pay in the long run.

    In other words if there's something new where people don't pay per listening/viewing session it will be crushed by the lawyers of the aforementioned 'Organizations'. As long as we don't find a politician that works for the people, this is how the future will be.

    The brother/sister orgs of RI/MPAA here in Europe told the lawmakers to get rid of the 'fair use' right by naming it an American
  • If there are hundreds of thousands of independent artists, music that is original, and as good or lots better, why not move on?

    A special event suggestion: Set a week or two, where every webcaster, college station, public radio station on the Internet, plays only those artists that do not demand royalties. Let's see if we don't have a huge pool of songs, artists, and stations that can come out of this event, with audiences that are bigger and more loyal than what is taking place with the RIAA nonsense.

    I

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