If you’ve been following this blog, you already know that Warner Music Group has made some pretty bad moves for the last few years, even morseo than the other major record labels. However, their newest venture, “Choruss” (dreamt up by consultant Jim Griffin) has to take the cake for the worst yet.
The basic plan is that major labels would “ask” (read: force) universities to pay them a fee, and in return, the labels promise not to sue the universities for copyright infringement. In theory, students can then keep on downloading, guilt-free, and labels get paid.
In actuality, such a scheme would be highly detrimental to artists, songwriters, and publishers.
Intellectual property lawyer Bennett Lincoff explains why: “Under Choruss’s programme, songwriters and music publishers will not have an enforceable right to receive royalties through Choruss for student file-sharing of recordings that contain their songs … if Choruss relies on covenants not to sue and thereby avoids the obligation to clear mechanical rights, songwriters and music publishers will end up with nothing, or next to nothing from student file-sharing of their songs.”
In other words, rather than create proper licenses for the music within the Choruss program, the people behind the scheme instead want to bypass that and instead simply promise not to sue students and universities. That’s all well and good (for the labels) but artists, songwriters, and publishers essentially depend on proper licenses to earn money from their work under U.S. law. Labels would have a stream of revenue from universities and no legal responsibility to pay that back out to anybody else.
How does this affect non-major artists and songwriters? Students will no doubt assume they simply have the right to download whatever they want - not just major label music - and will continue to do so without fear or guilt. Except, of course, there’s no possible way non-majors could have any hope of compensation from such a program.
Lastly, is this really teaching the right lesson to students? To them, they’re just getting a free pass to download lots of music. I doubt universities will thoroughly explain the legal framework of Choruss, and even if they do, I doubt most students would understand. We’d be telling people that music now has no value and that they can just pirate all they want. I don’t think that’s the message the music industry should be sending.
Choruss’s Covenant: The Promised Land (Maybe) For Record Labels; A Lesser Destination For Everyone Else [ip-watch]
Tags: bad ideas, Choruss, Digital Distribution, New artist models
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on Tuesday, March 24th, 2009 at 9:49 am and is filed under Industry news.
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