Legal free music downloads for computer

Byline: Cynthia L. Webb

The Recording Industry Association of America 's bid to stamp out music piracy is paying off to some extent, with the launch of more pay-for-download music services and an effort by a couple of brainy college students to provide legal tunes to their classmates.

Though the lure of free music will continue to tempt many downloaders, the new legal services that are spouting up are worth watching as the e-music industry continues to take shape.

Napster , the service that single-handedly started the Internet music wars, is back this week, if in name only. Backed by Roxio , Napster will officially relaunch this week as a pay-for-play online service aimed at competing directly with Apple 's iTunes service and RealNetworks 's Rhapsody .

The new Napster is hoping to win customers through the sale of pre-paid cards that music fans can use to purchase music downloads, The Los Angeles Times reported today. The cards will be sold "at 14,000 electronics retailers, supermarkets, convenience stores and other outlets around the country," the paper said. "Other online music services are planning to do the same, hoping to get a taste of the success that the long-distance companies have enjoyed from about $6 billion in annual prepaid-card sales. RealNetworks Inc.'s Rhapsody and FullAudio Inc. 's MusicNow plan to introduce prepaid cards next month, around the same time as Roxio though in fewer outlets," according to the L.A. Times. The cards will sell for $14.95 and will purchase 15 song downloads from the site, The San Francisco Chronicle explained.

The L.A. Times noted that the cards "should help the services solve one of the biggest problems they face as they try to grow into sustainable businesses. Their standard method of collecting money from customers -- by taking credit card numbers online -- excludes most teenage customers and scares off many older ones. Mike Bebel , the head of Roxio's Napster division, said the cards also would make it possible to buy downloads as gifts, potentially introducing more people to the service." * The Los Angeles Times: Napster To Sell Pre-Paid Cards For Web Music (Registration required)

More from the Chronicle: "Napster 2.0 will be the latest attempt by the record industry and technology companies to turn back the worldwide music-sharing fad ignited in 2000 by its predecessor, the original Napster of Redwood City. The record industry has labeled file sharing as illegal online piracy that it says has contributed heavily to a three-year slump in CD sales." * The San Francisco Chronicle: Cards For Paying Napster

Copyright Technicality = College Kids' Delight

The online music piracy fight has often centered on college campuses, with the recording industry targeting many wired students with piracy lawsuits. But leave it to some brainy students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to figure out a way to bring digital music to the masses without provoking the ire (hopefully) of the RIAA.

Two students "created an electronic music library that allows anyone on the MIT campus instant access to 3,500 CDs that span the musical spectrum from Beethoven to the Beatles to Beck. The technology -- dubbed the Library Access to Music Project , or LAMP -- is part electronic database, part old-fashioned campus radio -- with 12 channels. Students who want to program a channel go to the LAMP Web site to select a song or CD, which is delivered through the campus' closed-circuit cable television network to a dorm room, student lounge or faculty office," The San Jose Mercury News explained. "Only 12 students can choose tracks at any one time. Each student who requests a particular track becomes a D.J. for 80 minutes, then someone else gets to program. The LAMP system reserves 12 channels on the campus cable system. Anyone else on campus can listen in, selecting among the 12 channels. The designers said they will release the software behind the system for any other university that might want to duplicate it." * The San Jose Mercury News: New Tune on Digital Music

The Associated Press reported that 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 Associated Press via washingtonpost.com: Students Develop File-Swap Alternative

On the LAMP Web site, the creators say they hope the service will "cut down on students breaking the law just to listen to music. LAMP offers instant on-demand listening to about 50,000 songs quicker and more reliably than KaZaA can. And LAMP, unlike songs downloaded through KaZaA, is fully licensed and legal." In a frequently asked questions section, the creators answer why the service is legal: "We are transmitting music over the non-digital portion of MIT's internal cable television system. Because it is impossible to record exact copies of CDs from a non-digital cable television system, under the copyright law the licensing requirements are less stringent than for over the Internet: similar to the requirements for radio stations. MIT, like most universities and radio stations, pays for blanket licenses from the three organizations -- ASCAP, BMI, and SESAC -- that have the power to authorize analog transmissions of virtually all songs. These blanket licenses cost about 60 cents per student per year in total, including cable television rights."

The Boston Globe provided additional details today about how LAMP's creators, Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel , figured out a way to legally provide songs for free. "The students had hoped to stream the music files in digital form over the campus computer network. Then they learned that copyright law sets strict limits on such activities. ... But Winstein and Mandel found a loophole. The tough limits on digital music broadcasting didn't apply to analog broadcasting, the kind used by MIT's cable television systems. A cable broadcaster simply pays a blanket royalty fee to the major music licensing organizations, such as the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers , or ASCAP," the article said. "Like most colleges, MIT already pays such a fee to those organizations. And a cable broadcaster doesn't pay the additional royalty to the record companies. So Winstein and Mendel built a network that takes orders over the Internet, but plays the music back over the cable system. But they still had to work out a legal way to obtain recordings for broadcast. Winstein and Mandel used an Internet-based survey of MIT students to choose the music in the LAMP library. They settled on about 3,400 albums, ranging from the popular to the obscure. It took a year of negotiations with the National Music Publishers Association to reach agreement on a reasonable licensing fee for copies of the music." * The Boston Globe: Reinventing The Jukebox On Campus

Hal Abelson , an MIT professor of computer science and engineering who helped oversee LAMP's creation, told The New York Times: "Everybody has gotten so wedged into entrenched positions that listening to music has to have something to do with file sharing." He added: "[I]t doesn't have to be that way at all." The Times said that the RIAA, music industry reps and others did not offer comment on LAMP, which the newspaper noted was backed financially by Microsoft. "Although the M.I.T. music could still be recorded by students and shared on the Internet, Professor Abelson said that the situation would be no different from recording songs from conventional FM broadcasts. The system provides music quality that listeners say is not quite as good as a CD on a home stereo but is better than FM radio." * The New York Times: With Cable TV At M.I.T, Who Needs Napster? (Registration required)

Abelson told USA Today that LAMP "doesn't replace file sharing." He said, "You have to be there with your TV and you can't copy the music. But hopefully, it lessens the incentive to have to go copy files." * USA Today: LAMP Lights Way For Those Seeking Free, Legal, Net Tunes

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