Will Choruss screw publishers, songwriters and artists?
Doubts are emerging about the business model of the Choruss scheme being proposed in the US for legal file-sharing on university campuses. A long article on the blog Intellectual Property Watch fillets the scheme’s business model, focusing on the question of whether it will use a licensing model, or a covenant not to sue.
Although the net effects are the same – students download as much as they like, but labels get paid – there are significant drawbacks to the latter model, which involves the labels refraining from asserting claims of copyright infringement against students or colleges who have signed up to Choruss.
If that’s the model, that still leaves the mechanical rights – or as IP Watch puts it, “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.”
Oh, and artists will lose out too: “It is practically unheard of for a recording artist to have a right to share in record label revenue derived from covenants not to sue”.
The important thing to say here is that Choruss is still finalising the details of how its model will work – it’s not set in stone. But the debate around it shows yet again that innovative new music access models will be hamstrung if they don’t take into account the interests of ALL parties in the industry – labels, publishers and artists.
