Fresh Out of Outrage by George Ziemann -- March 26, 2009 There's a lot going on to be pissed off about, from Obama's DOJ taking the RIAA's side in the Tenenbaum case to the ISPs that are now delivering the takedown notices for the RIAA. Somewhere in there is Choruss, aka Warner Music's search for a money pool. DOJ As expected, Obama's RIAA-filled Dept. of Justice weighed in supporting the $750 to $150,000 per-song infringement damages. The amount of the damages is one of the constitutional issues the Harvard legal team has planned to bring up in the case of Sony v Tenenbaum. ISPs AT&T has now joined the RIAA team, along with Comcast and Cox, helping deliver millions of takedown notices. The obvious advantage to this approach over lawsuits is that the courts require actual evidence. "AT&T says they're not doing any of the actual spotting-the RIAA is handling that part-they're just 'forwarding notices from content providers to our customers' to edumacate them." -- Gizmodo article Choruss This is Warner Music's $5-a-month collective licensing plan that has been kicked around for a year or so. It has two distinguishing features: $5 a month No other facts are available -- and the $5 figure was "just thrown out there." Every time they've mentioned it. I've always thought this was not an idea to be trusted. Figured the extra 's' in Choruss was to make it sound more snakelike and sinister. Perhaps some sort of veiled transparency. Then the RIAA dropped the lawsuits, negating Choruss' main offer of not suing students. But it never was a collective licensing agreement. It was just a promise not to sue people. They've made that promise before. They were lying. Compared to, oh, I don't know, maybe the ongoing re-enactment of the Great Depression, this stuff is not really important. Don't share RIAA music and these are all irrelevant.

Related Content Choruss' Music Tax Plan: Bait-And-Switch at TechDirt RIAA's DoJ horns in on Tenenbaum case at p2p.net Your ISP Hates You: They're Probably Working With RIAA at Gizmodo