This morning as I woke up to NPR's Morning Edition, there was a story about a student project at MIT that is effectively a digital music library. One of the developers of this project said that one of his inspirations was the fact that the campus library owns lots of CDs but that most people don't make use of them because the library is too far for them to bother to walk when a certain CD isn't guaranteed to be checked in, etc.
So what this project does, as I understand it, is to emulate the functioning of a campus library over the campus' local cable TV network. Students can listen to music but not make a local copy of it, so the developers say it is legal. (But as Stuart Sutton would say, no one actually knows if it's fair use or not, until the courts decide.)
The reason I'm interested in this, of course, is my digital libraries class, which has made me more alert to DL projects. What caught my attention about this music-sharing project is that it attempts to emulate in a digital world the restrictions of library sharing, which is legal, traditional, and in my opinion unlikely to disappear (although stranger things have happened).
It's an interesting piece. Go listen!
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