EDUCAUSE Live! March 3, 2009 1:00 p.m. ET (12:00 p.m. CT, 11:00 a.m. MT, 10:00 a.m. PT); runs one hour

Choruss: A New Business Model for Digital Music

Special Guest

Jim Griffin
President
Choruss LLC

Jim Griffin is president of Choruss, an organization promoting a new business model for digital music, and managing director of OneHouse, an organization dedicated to the future of music and entertainment delivery. He works as a consultant to absorb uncertainty about the digital delivery of art. In addition to acting as an agent for constructive change in media and technology, he is an author who writes columns for magazines and serves on the boards of companies and associations. He started and ran for five years the technology department at Geffen Records. Prior to Geffen he was an international representative for The Newspaper Guild in Washington, D.C.

Griffin is co-founder of the Pho group. Named after the Vietnamese soup, Pho is an organization that meets for discussion-oriented meals in cities around the world, electronically linked by the Pho mailing list. Griffin testified in July 2000 before the Senate Judiciary Committee at its oversight hearing on file sharing and music licensing. He regularly moderates video and television shows on digital entertainment and is a frequent keynote speaker or moderator at conferences and lectures annually at business schools. He also serves as an expert witness in digital entertainment and has presented many continuing legal education courses. In addition to his work with music, his expertise includes wireless work in Europe. Griffin has moderated numerous panels on wireless and given speeches on wireless issues around the world. He is a regular speaker at entertainment industry events and at corporate and association meetings.

Summary

Your host, Steve Worona, will be joined by Jim Griffin, and the topic will be "Choruss: A New Business Model for Digital Music."

Per-copy charges for music and other intellectual property made sense when copies were physical objects, but that business model is ill-suited to the digital world. The mismatch has led to thousands of lawsuits against students and other consumers, tens of thousands of infringement notices sent to campuses and commercial ISPs, and millions of wasted person-hours dealing with these issues. Recently an alternate approach has been gaining momentum: voluntary collective licensing. In this model, endorsed by organizations as diverse as the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Warner Music Group, a flat monthly fee is collected covering all music access by a group of participants, generally the subscribers of a particular network. The money is then distributed to copyright holders based on the relative frequency of access of each individual work. In today’s presentation, we’ll hear from the president of Choruss, one of the organizations promoting blanket licensing. He’ll describe the advantages of this model and his plans for a series of campus-based pilot projects starting this fall.

Related EDUCAUSE Resources

• Campus or Subscription Music Services
• Licensing
• Archives of past EDUCAUSE Live! seminars

Additional Resources

• Nate Anderson, "'Functionally Voluntary' Music May Lead to Blanket Licenses," Ars Technica, August 18, 2008.
• Electronic Frontier Foundation, A Better Way Forward: Voluntary Collective Licensing of Music File Sharing ("Let the Music Play" Whitepaper), April 2008.
• Sam Gustin, "Fee for All," Portfolio.com, March 27, 2008.
• David Jennings, "Collective Blanket Licensing: Simple and Usable?" DJ Alchemi, January 8, 2005.
• The Campus Costs of P2P Compliance (October 2008): This paper reports the results of a summer 2008 survey designed to address the campus costs of compliance with the new P2P filesharing mandates in reauthorized Higher Education Act (HEA) signed into law on August 14, 2008. The report is based data from 321 colleges and universities and focuses on P2P compliance costs as reflected in expenditures (e.g., content and software licenses) and also the time that campus officials spend on P2P filesharing issues.