Reinventing the wheel: MIT's "music sharing network"
If you can get the words "sharing" and "network" into a project, you might make a splash with just about anything. That's essentially what's happened with a novel "music sharing" network pioneered at MIT. Being hailed by some journalists as the "answer" to P2P problems, the Library Access to Music Project (LAMP) has a few people forgetting what the point of digital music is. LAMP is, admittedly, a pretty cool project. Using the MIT cable TV network, songs from a databank of music are accessible by students and faculty via the TV, not unlike cable's "on-demand" features. 16 channels are reserved for use, which means that at any given time 16 different people can be in control of the various channels (but only 16, mind you). The legality of the "network" stems from the fact that the music is being broadcast in analog form, at a quality above FM, but certainly below that of quality encoded MP3s. In a sense, it's like a radio station that you tune in via your TV, but you have no ads, and may have full control.
