OT: Tabs and lyrics online illegal?

[Rose Immortal]

First with lyrics...this should be incentive for ALL bands to put their lyrics in the liner notes if they really are concerned--including compilation albums made for newbies. I don't know about you, but it really annoys me when I get a CD and discover there are no lyrics with it. Though I agree with you, I think that as long as you do not claim credit for the lyrics someone else wrote, it's a good thing. I would also think that in the U.S., anyway, where you have a lot of people who may have beliefs about certain kinds of lyrics, having lyrics available may let people make more informed decisions beforehand. Yes, that means some stuff might not be bought that would've by accident otherwise--but it also means that some people might actually buy something they weren't sure about before.

I think the only thing with tabs record labels are freaking out about is the possibility of somebody covering a song publicly and charging money for that performance, without paying proper royalties. I DON'T agree with this lawsuit--I'm just saying what I think their reasoning is.

 

[Beelzebub]

Does anyone know if any artists openly support this whole idea (no Lars jokes please)? It's understandable that musicians wouldn't want their songs available for download, but how do they feel about tabs/lyrics? If not, then it couldn't be any more obvious that this is an attempt to fatten the pockets of media companies.

 

[Horus]

I wouldn't be surprised if Lars Ulrich got onboard and started spewing crap out of his mouth about this.

 

[OfSinsAndShred]

You guys realize this isn't about record companies, it's the sheet music publishing companies.

This is so stupid. I hope this asshole doesn't succeed.

 

[The Metal Chick]

Actually, the most interested in copyright stuff are record companies, most bands do not actually care about them (well, they do care, but just aren't that paranoid).

Most bands do not care if their music is copied around, as long as they get a reasonable monthly income.

That's exactly what I said.

 

[Yngvai X]

Tabs represent individual interpretations of a certain musical piece. Theres is no legal copyright to that. When you make music aurally available to people, they are allowed to interpret it, you can't own sound and peoples ability to understand that sound.

Lyrics are a little dicier. There is a copyright in lyrics as a literary work. Reproducing them is technically not legal. For example, it would be clearly illegal to take a novel and reproduce it on the internet in text - you'd be interferring with sales of the novel. Lyrics are really just a shorter version of this event, but deserve their right in copyright none the less. However, posting lyrics on the net can be argued as a fair use because
1. The nature of the use - scholarly, just to share, not to make money
2. The nature of the work - lyrics are a part of a song and are generally not meant to stand on their own.
3. Substanciality of portion take - just the lyrics of the song, not the melody, arrangement, sound recording
4. Effect on the market - THE IMPORTANT ONE HERE! Posting lyrics NEVER interferes with income streams to the artist. Its not like anyone ever read the lyrics to a symhony X album and thought 'well, good enough, I'm not going to by the album now'.

There are good reasons for copyright limitations, they are just complicated. They are not as bad and greedy as people generally like to think. And as you can see, they don't allow for unreasonable things to happen. This whole case is nonsense and will definitly be thrown out of the courts. Anyone who knows anything about copyright will tell you intuitivly how moronic this attempt is.

This is a really good explination. Trying to limit illegal scans of tab books is a good idea, but you can't, absolutely CANNOT, restrict someone's transcription that they put online to share, for educational reasons really.