[Ecommerce] NYT on cable copyright rules and sharing music

[James Love]

With Cable TV at M.I.T., Who Needs Napster?

Rick Friedman for The New York Times
Josh Mandel, left, and Keith Winstein have created a new way to share music.

By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: October 27, 2003

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.



--
James Love, Director, Consumer Project on Technology
http://www.cptech.org, mailto:james.love@cptech.org
tel. +1.202.387.8030, mobile +1.202.361.3040