MIT students develop alternative to file-swapping

Kwitko · October 2003

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.

Read about it here.

The project's website: http://lamp.mit.edu/
The official MIT press release: http://lamp.mit.edu/lamp-release.txt

Source: The Associated Press