WITH CABLE TV AT M.I.T., WHO NEEDS NAPSTER?
By John Schwartz, New York Times, Oct. 27, 2003
Two students at the M.I.T. 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 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. 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."
