SECUR> SECURITY: MIT students develop alternative to file-swapping

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Net Happenings - From Educational CyberPlayGround
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MIT students develop alternative to file-swapping
Monday October 27, 12:00 am ET
By Justin Pope, AP Business Writer
http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/031027/na_fin_us_file_swapping_alternative_2.html

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) -- 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 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.

On Monday, the pair planned 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.

--snip--

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