The collapse of online music services like Ruckus has left a void in students’ legal downloading options, which the recording industry promotes, colleges encourage, and federal law now requires them to offer.
Enter Choruss, a new blanket-licensing system that would bill colleges and compensate artists based on how much music students were downloading. The project, financed by Warner Music Group, is still in the works, and its president, Jim Griffin, has been out and about lately taking questions.
Last week he spoke to music-industry types at a conference of Digital Music Forum East, and this week he checked in with campus officials in an online chat with Educause. In the latter, Mr. Griffin appealed to educators’ sense of intellectual property. “It’s become voluntary,” he said, “to pay for music products.”
His solution: to pursue “intelligent monetization” by working with colleges to measure music downloading on their networks. Colleges’ help will mean better data, Mr. Griffin said — maybe even journal articles. He is eager for analysis but not free research: “We don’t expect people to be making donations of their time,” he told the Educause audience. “We’re happy to bear those costs.”
Colleges should consider Choruss not just to work on a challenging issue, but to do the right thing to “incent creativity,” Mr. Griffin said. “To keep good stuff coming, there needs to be money such that people can eat.”
He responded to early criticisms of the project, dismissing, for example, its characterization as a tax. The system will be flexible, he said, allowing colleges to set it up for students to opt in or out. And collecting data on downloads will involve after-the-fact accounting, not real-time interception, he said, although he did mention Audible Magic, a company whose patrolling software some institutions oppose on academic-freedom grounds.
Some librarians worry that Choruss will levy fees even for work covered by copyright law’s “fair use” provisions. Mr. Griffin responded to that concern by describing radio stations’ licenses with the performing-rights organization Broadcast Music Inc. even though some of the songs on their airwaves are covered by fair use.
The link between signing up for Choruss and a supposed “covenant not to sue” (by music companies that have engaged in a mass-litigation campaign against students) has prompted some observers to call it an extortion scheme. Mr. Griffin sought to dispel that impression, too, but he predicted that using the service would diminish the “takedown” notices colleges get from the recording industry. —Sara Lipka
