‘Tens of thousands’ sign up for Choruss
p2pnet news view | P2P | Music:- I’m a simple man, and for me, it’s really simple:
Anything attached to, or associated with, Warner Music is blighted.
Warner’s Choruss school licensing scheme is being touted by its main engineer, Jim Griffin (left) as, at the least, a partial answer to the bitter and brutal anti-P2P, anti-music-lover, anti-file sharing actions launched by Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music, American, but run by Canadian Edgar Bronfman jr (right), against their own customers.
But for me:
- Until the members of the Big 4 Music Gang admit their approach to the online filesharing phenomenon has been wrong from the beginning;
- Until they apologise to the thousands of people around the world whose lives they’ve made thoroughly miserable with their bizarre sue ‘em all marketing campaign; and,
- Until they drop their specious lawsuits against people such as Jammie Thomas-Rasset —-
—- nothing they say or do will be worth a damn.
Half-truths, innuendo, rumor
Warner Music’s cynical Choruss licensing plan has it that students will pay Warner $5 a month for unlimited music downloads.
And already, “Tens of thousands of students have signed up to pay for a legal P2P music program in US universities, set to start later this year in experimental form,” said Andrew Orlowski in The Register on Wednesday, describing Choruss as, “the incubator hatched by Jim Griffin – a long-time advocate of licensing P2P sharing on networks”.
He went on:
“Choruss won’t ultimately be in the retail or service business, Griffin told us in Washington DC today – but it may provide an ‘umbrella’ for managed service companies such as Playlouder MSP, the technology partner for the suspended Virgin Unlimited music service. ‘We’re not in the business of distribution,’ he said.”
Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music have been trying, and failing, to use their RIAA to sue people into becoming compliant corporate consumers, and until very recently, students were the primary Big 4 targets, I posted in an earlier article.
In a private email response, “Your publication seeks to represent a great technology and culture that deserves much better than you give it,” Griffin told me, among other things.
“What we get from you are half-truths, innuendo, rumor and other unverified commentary.”
Actually, Jim, unlike Choruss, p2pnet isn’t entrepreneurial and although p2pnet has contributions from other people, I represent only myself. What you get from me personally is opinion — my opinion — and an attempt to unspin the spin and present the view from the other side of the fence; the side which gets absolutely minimal play in the mainstream media.
But, in my opinion, what we get from you on Choruss are howling blizzards of finely wrought and carefully tuned words which obscure, rather than clearly answer, important questions.
The Warner Music Solution
In the piece Jim referred to in his email, I said Brittany Kruger and Joel Tenenbaum and others in schools across America are being told, “Pay us thousands of dollars, or we’ll sue you and make your lives living hell.”
It’s blackmail, I wrote, going on »»»
P2P file sharing continues unabated everywhere, but the RIAA were able to use the ever-cooperative mainstream media to put across the totally erroneous message that the sue ‘em all marketing campaign was working.
The Big 4 were getting away with it, but at the cost of haemorrhaging customers and being villified as the cowardly bullies they are.
Then along came Warner Music with The Answer —- Choruss , organised around the same simple bottom line (since that’s what it’s all about) that’s already popular with Vivendi Universal (France), Sony (Japan), EMI (Britain), and Warner Music (US):
Blackmail: we won’t sue you if you pay us.
Except Warner calls it licensing.
‘An experiment to help gauge pricing’
Says Andrew in The Register article cited earlier »»»
The fact that such large numbers have volunteered to pay for a P2P service defies the conventional music industry wisdom that the only way to compete with the pirates is with free offerings. It also shows how much Choruss has evolved since it first broke the surface last April, when talk was of opting students in automatically, in return for a “coventant not to sue”.
Many of El Reg’s criticisms from last year have been taken on board it seems. So instead of being herded like sheep into a compulsory scheme, Choruss envisages voluntary, paying customers.
“Here’s a market some have written off, and said they’re not willing to pay. People have voted with their own money: The student representatives allocated their own money to pay for music. They don’t want to pay for Music the Product, but Music the Service,” said Griffin.
The most significant aspect of a voluntary, pay-for service is that it spikes the argument that licensing networks need involve is a “music tax”. Griffin said the project should be regarded as an experiment to help gauge pricing.
“As an industry, we don’t do much testing, or experimenting, and learn at what price point someone would choose to participate in this system.
Phase Two of Choruss involves rolling out legal P2P to ISPs across the land.
“We can [soon] approach ISPs with metrics in hand, not speculation.”
“We’re not arriving to Hoover information off the student networks, that would violate their privacy. We need to ensure academic self-administration is respected.”
One or two questions …
Griffin is on record in a widely read online publication as saying, “Tens of thousands of students have signed up to pay for a legal P2P music program in US universities, set to start later this year in experimental form”.
Tens of thousands? That’s a lot.
But he fails to go into detail, leaving all kinds of really important questions hanging, ie »»»
- Who are all these students, specifically?
- Where are they, specifically?
- When these tens of thousands signed on the dotted line, where they each given a document which clearly explained what they’d signed up for — the terms of service?
- If Choruss is an answer (the answer?) to the Vivendi Universal, EMI, Sony Music — and Warner — sue ‘em all campaign, are students who sign up automatically protected from subpoenas and lawsuits and ‘ settlement’ demands?
- If not, what, specifically, is the benefit to them?
- Do the files students download belong to them?
- Under Choruss, can students share? And if they can, what about the person(s) they share with?
- Who actually administers Choruss Main, and from where?
And as I asked in my most recent post, is a sampling program installed on students’ computers to monitor compliance to the terms of service, whatever they are or may be?
- If so, what will it consist of?
- Where will it come from?
- How, exactly, will it work?
- Who’ll control it?
- Who’ll get the resultant data?
- And what will they do with it?
Are my questions terribly naive, and should I know better than to ask them?
I honestly don’t know. But I’m sure a lot of other people are wondering the same thing.
Siphoning middleman cash
TechDirt’s Mike Masnick was one of the first people to question whether or not Choruss really is the next best thing to sliced bread.
He called it a bait-and-switch ooperation, saying “This is quite a scheme that the record labels and Griffin may pull off”»»»
- Convince universities to buy into the program with no input from students. Universities will buy into it because they think they’re “helping” deal with the “problem” of file sharing… and to avoid Congress forcing them into such agreements
- Universities pass the cost on to students (of course), so students are forced to pay for this
- Record labels get a big chunk of money for no good reason
- New expensive bureaucracy (Choruss) gets set up to siphon more middleman cash away from musicians
- Record labels don’t do anything different, since they already have started moving away from suing individuals (sorta)
- The public thinks that file sharing is now legal
- Record labels continue to sue and shut down favorite file sharing networks, leaving only crappy, limited and expensive “approved” systems
- Individuals who paid up start getting sued by other rightsholders not covered by this agreement and not getting any money from it
And, “most of the press will eat it up as a revolutionary agreement whereby the record labels ‘legalize’ file sharing,” he added.
Meanwhile, as I said at the beginning,for me, it’s simple:
KISS – Keep It Simple, Stupid.
The labels need to »»»
- Drop the lawsuits against their own customers, the people who keep them in business in the first place, and stop treating them like imbeciles
- Fully open their catalogues (all of them)
- Drastically reduce their wholesale prices
- Start treating their customers as reasonable and honest people, instead of would-be criminals and thieves
- Start competing instead of controlling (I know, I know – scary)
Then they won’t have to worry about all these costly and complicated schemes which aren’t going to work anyway as long as P2P is around.
All they’ll have to do is sit back and watch the money roll in.
Stay tuned.
Jon Newton – p2pnet
June, 2009
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June 12th, 2009 at 12:51 pm
It is unwise to twist the tail of the tiger.
I have a feeling you will regret this.
June 12th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
Which tiger is that?
As for Choruss, my primary concern is whether or not potential students have to choose between paying the recording industry and cutting off their formal education.
June 12th, 2009 at 1:03 pm
Bow down to our blackmail or we will extort you.
Choice is yours to make.
June 12th, 2009 at 1:09 pm
There is nothing to regret in Jon’s criticism. It is necessary that someone who’s in contact with these people to have the ability to question and scrutinize them. If Jon doesn’t, who will? Politicians who don’t understand it and dont’ want to?
Charlie Angus clarified for me Wednesday the stance of politicians. They operate well in panic mode, lock it down/make it illegal/squash the problem. That’s what they know and do. They can’t wrap their heads around anything technical and they don’t have the time to try.
However, using words like “competition, freedom of speech, extortion, abuse of rights, NO VOTE FOR YOU” they listen loud and clear. Despite the money pouring in from lobbyists, if you write to several MP’s in your area, and “tens of thousands” of people do the same in their areas, you’ll see the politicians listening to you. Sure, money talks and campaigns are great with money, but MP’s are smart enough to know that votes count more than $$$. If people catch on that you’re being bought, you’re over! That is, if people can put their personal problems and worries on hold and look outside their own little world for just a few moments! Then maybe get off the couch and do something!
June 12th, 2009 at 6:28 pm
Ya! Even if it was free I will never sign up to any thing owned by the entertainement parasites and terrorists.
They can take their chorus shit and put it where I think it should go and will go!