Will MIT LAMP Light a Fire?

Undergraduates
with time on their hands are the Mother’s of Invention, as the history
of Napster clearly shows. Now a pair of 20ish MIT students have come
up with a workaround for the RIAA’s labyrintian limitations on digital
music distribution by – is nothing Holy – going Analog.

The dream – free music on demand anywhere on campus at anytime.  The
reality – well, there are still a few drawbacks to this MIT hack, which
is called the Library Access to Music Program, or LAMP.

”We assumed that the technical part of doing this would be the hard
part,” said Winstein. ”We were totally wrong.”

Among the drawbacks: to avoid digital liscencing fees, the music is
distributed in analog form, over the campus fiber-optic network. The
conversion results in some sound degradation. Students
need to listen to the tunes on their television sets, or on PCs with
TV cards.  And a maximum of 16 users at a time (out of an on-campus
population of more than 6,000) can request tunes from the server.

from the New York Times