That said, if I were a particularly courageous administrator, I would charge ahead with something like this and see if the cease and desist letters come in. I highly doubt they would.

But ultimately, this points us down a road we’re going to have to tread at some point–that is, what “special” privileges should we enjoy given our role in society. I, for one, believe that we should be given the leeway to provide and distribute digital content in a reasonably useful manner. This means that certain barriers that exist for private users should not be there for us.

That, of course, takes a committed lobbying effort from the more influential members of our leadership.

From what I understand, webcasting (and I’m including iTunes sharing) counts as public performance of a copyrighted work. I think the reason that we can get away with sharing our music over iTunes on private networks is because there’s the assumption we’re sharing it privately, with a small group of people. It’s a “performance” of the copyrighted work, but not a public one.

According to copyright law, a performance becomes public when one performs or displays “it at a place open to the public or at any place where a substantial number of persons outside of a normal circle of a family and its social acquaintances is gathered” - and I think libraries would qualify under both criteria there.

In regards to fair use, if we were to provide this service, we would be doing the same thing millions of iTunes users are already doing: providing guest access to a music collection. The nature of iTunes actually prevents other users from copying the data–a significant barrier to those who might otherwise borrow and rip the CD anyway. Looking at the fair use FAQ you linked to, I don’t see anything in there that seems to suggest that doing this would violate its basic elements.

Is there a legal difference between a library that purchases music CDs legally and rips them to share via iTunes and an individual who does the same? (I don’t know, I’m asking) The only difference I can think of is that a library’s shared library could be significantly larger, but when has there ever been a cap on how much of your own music you can store?

I can see how it might not sit well with the folks at RIAA, but I doubt they would have the justification to shut the service down. I doubt they’d pay much notice anyway.

I was really excited by this idea when I read about it, but I couldn’t find a way for MFPOW to get around paying (what I assume would be steep, since you’re apparently both performing and distributing the copyrighted works) licensing fees.

The RIAA website suggests a voluntary license would be required for this kind of usage (I think this falls into the “Internet jukebox” category, as they describe it on that page).

I also don’t think this would fall under the category of fair use. Although clearly this kind of sharing would be for noncommercial purposes, it doesn’t seem to meet the other criteria.

…

Steve, you’re correct about iTunes throwing that error, but mt-daapd does not, though I think you can configure the number of simultaneous users and unique users per day if you wish–I’ll check on this.

But perhaps I am mistaken, or perhaps mt-dappd gets around this problem?