MIT Music Scheme Crashes

As noted here
earlier, MIT attempted to solve the on-campus music-on-demand conundrum
by going analog, thereby bypassing the Digital Millenium Copyright Act
– Not so fast, gearheads!.

It was hailed as ingenious: a way to listen to music on demand while
avoiding the legal battleground of file sharing. Best of all, the music
was fully licensed, so there would be no legal trouble.

But it was not, and there is. On Friday, the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology announced that it would temporarily shut down its groundbreaking
Library Access to Music System until the licensing rights can be worked
out.

To Jonathan Zittrain, who teaches Internet law at Harvard and is a director
of the university’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society, that incident
shows that the world of copyright has grown so arcane that even the major
players do not even understand it. "It doesn’t seem that M.I.T.
was trying to steal anything, but rather to simply hew to the letter
of the law in an incredibly byzantine area," he said. "Good
faith and technical genius alone doesn’t make it work."

from
the New York Times