Since one presumes that Microsoft does not sell much music (didn't they shut down their music store a few years ago?), I can't imagine they've negotiated dues that scale linearly on Microsoft's total revenue - so, in fact, I'd expect that $1M is well beyond their RIAA dues.
Now, it's possible that MS is contributing money other than dues to the RIAA, but you can bound that a bit from their Form 990: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131... For 2017, they got under $100K in "contributions and grants" and $29MM in "program service revenue," which is later determined to be dues. They received no other significant revenue. So no donor could have possibly given them more than $100K.
(... also, why did the RIAA give $4K to the Kenai River Sportfishing Association?)
Why? They're complying with the license. It shouldn't be surprising to see them taking advantage of copyright law when it benefits them, then turning around and taking advantage of copyright law them it benefits them. It's quite a bit more benign than Disney making movies off of public-domain stories while lobbying to keep Mickey Mouse under copyright, since they didn't even lobby for it. The WordPress developers just gave them the code for free.
Free and open-source software isn't subversive. It's innovative, which isn't the same thing. It's certainly a new model, but the way you get a GPL violation removed from GitHub is with a DMCA takedown notice. Free and open-source software is a different and nicer use of the copyright system, but it's all still the same system at the end of the day.
And now that they've had a couple decades to get over their discomfort and they've realized that there's nothing subversive there, people who love copyright are totally fine with free and open-source software, because it furthers their goal of making money.
Unfortunately it seems difficult to discover how long they’ve been a member: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24902985
They could theoretically have donated $2MM at $50K a year if they had joined back around the time when Bill Gates was railing about ‘theft’ of his BASIC (and others were replacing it with a superior ‘@copyleft all wrongs reserved’ one) ~45 year ago.
This is a great first step. We need to ramp up the pressure.
The newish Microsoft seems to be more understanding of this sort of thing with supporting Linux with Office and giving Windows 10 away for free.
This would instantly improve their reputation among the entire developer community. DMCA is an abusive mess that is constantly used to attack legitimate open-source work, research, or simply just by bad actors to take down literally anything they want from the internet.
The big websites like Reddit don't care about legitimacy, it's all automated agreement, I've seen entire subreddits taken down due to fake DMCA requests by someone who didn't like what the subreddit was about (And it was too small of a place for it to make enough noise to matter to anyone, nor did anyone try or know how to try). We hear small samples of it here on HN but who knows the amount of abusive and unwarranted DMCA notices that you never hear about.
