MIT Students Create Online Music Network Using Campus Cable TV System

Authored by Mark Hefflinger on October 27, 2003 - 10:13am.

Cambridge, Mass. -- Two students at MIT have created what they believe to be a legal means for students to access digital music on demand through the campus's cable television network. The Library Access to Music Project (LAMP), created by MIT students Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, allows faculty and students to choose songs to listen to from an online library and play them through stereos or TVs, but does not permit downloading or copying. By using the school's analog cable TV system, LAMP appears to take advantage of less-stringent copyright laws and fall under licenses the school already pays to performing rights organizations. The streaming songs LAMP uses are being provided by Seattle-based Loudeye Technologies, which has licenses from all five major record labels. The system features 16 channels of pre-programmed radio, and lets users become the DJ and program 80-minute programming blocks from the 3,500 CDs in the LAMP library. Winstein and Mandel plan to publish the Linux software that powers LAMP for free so that other schools may implement similar systems. LAMP was funded by iCampus, a research alliance between MIT and Microsoft Research focused on furthering education through faculty and student technology projects.
http://biz.yahoo.com/prnews/031027/sfm107_1.html
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/27/technology/27mit.html
http://www.loudeye.com
http://lamp.mit.edu