Only a few days after its implementation, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology program to provide students with free music is offline.

The Library Access to Music Project ran into to troubles with licensing rights for some of the 3,500 CDs in its library. According to an article in The Los Angeles Times, the Loudeye Corporation, which sold MIT the CDs, did not have the licensing rights from all the publishers and record labels.

‘We have had to make some temporary changes to LAMP,’ said Kristen Collins, a MIT spokeswoman. According to Collins, the system will be down for ‘at least a couple of weeks,’ while the school talks with Loudeye, record labels and the publishers.

‘We are trying to work with anyone that will help get the system back up,’ Collins said.

The project was launched Monday, Oct. 27, but problems arose last Thursday when Loudeye notified MIT of the legal licensing issues. MIT officials maintain that since October 2002, Loudeye assured the institute that all content the school purchased was licensed.

‘MIT has at all times sought to implement a legal music service for its students,’ MIT said in a statement. ‘We relied on Loudeye to provide us with authorized content and for Loudeye to facilitate and obtain the appropriate licenses.’

Loudeye officials denied such claims.

‘We provided content to MIT,’ Loudeye publicist Stan Raymond said in an interview with The Los Angeles Times. ‘We did not provide licenses for them to issue that content.’

The system allowed students to listen to a catalog of CDs over an analog signal through MIT’s cable television station. Students signed onto the website through the university, checked out a channel and had access to the library’s 3,500 CD collection.

The system was considered legally impenetrable since the thought-to-be licensed songs were not transferred digitally and could not be downloaded or copied.

The project was the brainchild of Keith Winstein and Josh Mandel, both students at MIT, as part of a two-year research project. It was funded by part of the Microsoft Corporation’s grant to the institute called iCampus.

‘MIT continues to be committed to developing a fully licensed service,’ MIT said in the statement.