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Threatening Online Tablature
mr_don't writes: "Howard Sacks, president of RenegadeOLGA, has recently released this statement describing the future of RenegadeOLGA after being threatened by the powerful National Music Publishers Association and it's attack dog, the Harry Fox Agency. The RenegadeOLGA.com website has posted a lengthy description of the events that led up to the legal threats. Apparently, the Harry Fox Agency is working with NBCi to develop a digital sheet music site called Songfile.com, and they are using legal threats to eliminate any competiton." Outlawing amateur tablature is a bit like outlawing sports spectators from reporting scores on games they watch -- that is to say, not currently as outrageous as it should be.
What Vuarnet wrote reminds of the following:
"They first came for the communists, but I was not a communist so I did not speak. Then they came for the jews, but I was not a jew so I did not speak (etc)"
Not to compare them with Nazis, but you get the idea. We have to realize that these are not separate things. It's all the same. When will the persecution stop?? It's up to us to do something, I guess.
Instead of copying other people's creative works (Napster, guitar tab sites, ROM sites, and so on), how about if all you guitarists out there write some original work, license it under the Open Content License, and then distribute it on the Net? Then you, too, can tell Harry Fox to take a hike.
Hell, maybe if you write some tabs, and some other people write some lyrics, and you all use an open content license, we can actually have Free Music that comes with all the ingredients for the next generation of musicians to tinker with freely.
> Somebody nuke NBCi and this other group for me
:) NBCi have been aquired by NBC (think "stop the bleeding"), who are shutting it down.
It's already happened
I'm amazed at how easily people buy into all that conservative rhetoric. In case you did not know, we have three branches of government: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. Those branches act as checks and balances against each other.
Every year, congress writes dozens of laws which violate the constitution. If the courts blindly interpreted those laws, there would be no point in having a constitution at all. In order to keep the constitution intact, the judicial branch has the power to declare a law unconstitutional.
Even if a law is constitutional, the judicial branch has the duty to interpret the law, and they may well believe the law was never intended to apply in some specific case.
Keep in mind, those checks and balances are our buffer against corruption. If a single corrupt interest manages to control all three branches, our final option is the second ammendment. This is what George Washington was referring to when he warned us about political parties.
At least one PhD dissertation has been written on using wavelet transforms to attempt to reconstruct musical notation from a recorded performance. It wasn't terribly successful....
I tend to think that it would be a bit more that a small project to come up with rip-tab!
- A.P.
--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
What about those bands who can play by ear (ie do not write down the tablature, but play what they hear)?
Shades of Farenheight 451. It would appear that after centuries of progress, we're back to oral tradition if we want to have any sort of culture that is not wholly owned by various imortal corperate entities who will happily twist it to maximise their profits and minimize questions.
It took mankind thousands of years to develop the technology required to preserve culture and heritage through the generations.
It looks like it will take corperate entities, judges and congress just over 100 years to completely destroy those thousands of years of progress.
I have to wonder, if Bell had realised that ultimatly the gramaphone would be instrumental in handing ownership of culture over to the RIAA, would he have destroyed it quietly?
At the rate we're going, the first generation in U.S. history to never see a copyright expire has already been born.
Laws are enforced by actions in court. If a law is not within the constitutional power of the government, it is not within the constitutional power of the court to enforce.
On top of that, the Federalist Papers were *quite* clear that this was a role of the court; it was a *selling point* to a population that didn't trust central governments . . .
hawk
>I am not talking about the supreme court only. Judges are appointed
>because of their political affiliations in all levels.
There has been more success by both parties at the lower level, yes.
>The senate
>blockade of Clinton's nominees was mostly for federal and appelate
>judges, not the supreme court.
>the "blockade" is a *bit* more complicated than that, but I'll let it pass.
>Plus, you have just said what I said.
>Judges have a political affiliation that is crucial to their decision.
Yes, but at the top level, this political affiliation is only loosely
correlated with with the party appointing the judge.
>You can dress it up as constitutional interpretation.
It's not a matter of "dressing it up". It is *supposed* to be
constitutional interpretation, but as I said, this only has 2.5 of
the 9 votes at the mements. Then the democrats have 4, and the
republicans 2.5. Scalia and Thomas are the only ones who will
consistently vote for a result they don't like when the constitution
requires it--and when Scalia writes the majority opinions in those
cases, it's easy to tell he doesn't like the results.
> Sometimes it is,
>and sometimes it is raw favoritism ( cf. Gore vs. Bush. ).
Unless you're referring to the Florida Supreme Court, this is
just nonsense. The result they reached is the only possible
result that is consistent with the last 100 years of administrative
law and the last 150 of election law. (But yes, I was surprised
that they were able to create a 7 vote majority on the substance
of the issue that relied solely on well-settled law. And for the
record, I'd have joined with the two liberal justice who joined
the majority but thought that Florida should be able to try to
do something consistent with the decision in the 28 (?) or so
hours that remained. I think that the 5 votes that said there
was no possible way to do wo were correct that there would be no
way to meat the deadline [but then again, I had thought there was
no way to get a 7 vote majority based on established principles.
Nonetheless, the state was still entitled to try.)
>>If you look at the actual voting records rather than the political and
>>media hype, you'll find that your best friend on the court (most
>>likely to vote in your favor when faced with government power or
>>intrusion) is Thomas... followed by Scalia.
>I see you have been an intern on Pravda. Could you please supply us
>with some precise examples of Thomas and Scalia protecting me (
>assuming 'me' to be an ordinary citizen without big pockets) against
>anything?
When you cross from generalizations about the behaviro of the court
from years of observation, you get into things that I charge to do.
As such, I won't do it off the cuff. If you or anyone else wants
to cover my retainer, I'll be happy to provide the examples, the
contra-examples, and a detailed analysis. I doubt, though, that
anyone reading slashdot would be interested enough to cover my
minimum fee
>There have been a number of statistical studies of the supreme court.
>There is little doubt that except for the dramatically out of line
>Warren court the US Supreme court has never been in the business of
>protecting ordinary Americans against anything.
Only by those who reach this conclusion before thinking.
> The typical supreme
>court decision protecting against over-zealous government is Dred
>Scott Vs. Stanford, Row vs. Wade is rather the exception.
Curious. You cite the two leading candidates for the worst cases
to ever come down from the court. And no, I don't mean for the
results reached, but for the flagrant abuse of judicial power
used to reach the conclusion in both cases.
>But then, since you are a fan of Scalia, I assume you think Dred Scot
>was a shining example of protecting personal liberties. Good for you!
Ahh, nothing like a good old ad hominem attack when you're relying
on simple ignorance. I would, however, love to read the dissent
that Scalia would have written in that case . . .
>you have a rather skewed view of the approaches taken by the two
>parties here . .
>>I believe I have a realistic understanding that the Republican party
>>is doing what it can to close the door of the court to all but the
>>insanely rich.
Uh, yeah. Leaving aside the fact that it's the moderately rich that
tend to be republican, and that the insanely rich and very big
corporations tend to lean democratic, this just plain falls into the
"what color is the sky in your world category." I was actually
taking you seriously until this.
>You are welcome to prove me wrong.
From the last couple of your comments, it's clear that there's no point.
If God came down and told you otherwise, you'd take it as a
republican trick.
hawk,esq.
*both* parties try to put in judges who view the constitution in the same way as they do. Suggesting that either party does more of this is simply ignorant (at least if you leave out Al Gore--to the best of my knowledge, he's the only candidate for president from either major party in modern history to promise a litmus test on a particular issue).
The republican track record in getting Supreme Court justices to point their way is pathetic; they'd do as well by drawing random names for the membership rolls of the bar in various states--Earl Warren and Justice Souter come to mind.
Right now there's a 3 way split on the court, with the classic liberals holding the swing votes between the liberal/democratic block (about half of which were appointed by republicans) and the conservative/republican block.
If you look at the actual voting records rather than the political and media hype, you'll find that your best friend on the court (most likely to vote in your favor when faced with government power or intrusion) is Thomas (again, against all reasonable expectations at the time of his appointment), followed by Scalia (unless the safety of a police officer is involved). Then comes Kennedy on his good days.
i
On his bad days, Kennedy joins the conservative block and votes like a good
republican. The other six votes are entirely predictable (2 republican and
4 democratic).
The "unual and unexpected coalition" you sometimes here referred to
comes up when the classic liberals vote with the liberals--and these
votes are quite predictable.
When you see a 6-3 vote with Thomas, Rehnquist, and Kennedy in dissent, watch out. Look quickly; the conservatives and liberals just ganged up and took away some of your liberties. Even worse tend to be the 7-2 votes, when Kennedy *doesn't* joint Thomas and Scalia . . . *ugh*
hawk, esq. and civile libertarian at large
Lyrics.ch is my all time favorite example of the sort of world the RIAA and associated friends would like to see. Their use of (signed, and thus dangerously unsafe) Java to prevent cut and paste, printing, or even screen shots (no control over the scroll rate for you!) is just insulting. Trust us to not be downloading non-sandboxed Java code to reformat your hard disk, and we'll trust you to see the precious and secret lyrics to 'Happy Birthday' on your computer screen momentarily. And, while you're here, why not click on our banner ads?
Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday to you, Happy Birthday dear citizen, Happy Birthday to you.
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Yes, it's time to have every law that abuses the term "limited" in the copyright clause thrown out. Yes, it's time to have every law that abuses the commerce clause thrown out. The same kind of abuse of the Constitution that leads to routine abuse of probable cause leads to abuse like this, and abuse of the fifth and tenth amendments.
What we need is a law that attaches serious consequnces to anyone enforcing unconstitutional laws. You bet lawmakers would hear about it pretty quick the first time a bureaucrat got thrown in jail for being overenthusiatic about the power an unconstitutional law conferred on him. Laws are too often made as private deals between lawmakers and law enforcers or, as in this case, people who derive their living by being private enforcers. If there are no consequences, this will go out of control.
I wrote parts of this stuff
The first step was to get the archive dumped off of the University of Nevada's servers. Then anyone else hosting it would get the nasty letters too. You'd have to hope the cross-atlantic links and the Italian site hosting the archive were up and hope you'd be able to find the tab you were looking for quickly enough.
Of course the maintenance goes downhill too, when you can't connect to the archive or officially host it you can't very well keep adding tabs for all the new stuff that keeps coming along, and whether your preferences run toward the newest Blink182 or the next Satriani album or even Shania, being able to grab tab is nice.
And while some might look at tab as 'cheating', don't forget how many beginners learn from it, people that might not get to hang around with decent guitar players or have money for lessons.
Again, the issue comes down to fair use in an interconnected society and the inability of old distribution and reward models to fit to an interconnected society.
Good luck to OLGA!
Chris Cothrun
Curator of Chaos
Bleh!
>>...downloading the lyrics is wrong.
>Well they are copyrighted too. Downloading them
>is really not wrong, but distributing them might
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I always thought that downloading *is* a method of distribution.
Nevermind that some of these tabs (as was some of the lyrics on lyrics.ch) are "backward engineered", in that they are other people's interpretations of what the lyrics or tabs might be or probably are. They'll be determined to keep control to the point they'll make their tabs completely unusable. Copyright holders need to look at things in a different light.
By your argument, I could read a book and post my interpretation of the book on the web. This interpretation would have a significant amount of content from the originial - so much so that it is very recognizable as the original. (For a song, this just means getting the "hook".) Basically, this is called copying and under IP laws (for many moons) it has been illegal. How do we know these people aren't just buying tab books (or even borrowing them) and just copying that to the web? I mean, Christ, these people are simply copying! It's that simple. Pure and simple, posting tabluature is very clear violation of copyright.
Interpretations of music, namely performances, have always costed those who play them. However, it is utterly unfeasible to follow all live performances, so establishments that have live performaces pay blanket fees based on the number of cover performaces they will or did have (based on some statistics, like how often they have live performaces, etc.). So even your interpretations argument does not hold.
I don't think the Harry Fox agency is being unreasonable. They are protecting the copyrights of the musicians who sat and wrote the music. If the musicians are willing, let them give away the tablature.
Besides, if you want to be a decent musician (namely guitarist), put down the tab, open your ears and listen to what you want to play and attempt to recreate it. Hell, you may even write something original in the process. This is generally how music is written anyway.
Nagash
If tab is put up in partial form, then I'm not sure where the line gets drawn. As you mentioned, posting the whole thing is the bad thing. I was referring to this. I don't use tabs anymore, so I haven't gone looking for them for a long time.
You are also correct that you cannot copyright chord changes. What you do have copyright on, however, is the arrangement of the piece and its performance. Note that this is not like a patent or trademark! Other people can still use it, they just can't use the exact same one. When you publish/post (full) tablature, you are essentially copying the original arrangement. If you only give out certin "licks" or "riffs", I doubt that's a major infringement. Of course, I don't know where the line is drawn - that's always been the fuzzy part about this.
Nagash
Do you guys get that over there occasionally? Can you get rid of judges who are clueless? Do you have any frigging say in the way your country is run at all?
The purpose of a judge in the U.S. is to interpret existing law. It's entirely possible that amateur tablature falls in the category of "fair use." (I think it would), but a judge might very rule that it is copyright infringement. It depends on how you interpret the law. At least in this case we're not likely to have the situation, as in the Napster suit, where the judge has no frigging clue...online tablature is basically the same as writing it down on a piece of paper.
The real question is is writing it (the tablature...the music if you will) down a piece of paper and then distributing it to the masses copyright infringement? If I just write it down and give it to a few friends, may. But if I write it down take it to a print shop, have a million copies made and even if I don't sell them for $10 a pop, well, maybe that IS copyright infringement. Translating a work is considered to be one of the protected rights under copyright. That's what you have to consider.
My journal has hot
Innovation has become the sole province of corporations, it seems, and this is EXTREMELY DANGEROUS. This is an unprecedented attack on the sovereignty of the individual, on many different fronts, concocted by people who have few common ties but the ability to profit from conformity, and it isn't getting any better. We can keep fighting them point-by-point to slow down the machine's progress, but what can we do to reverse the trend? What can we do to restore discovery, initiative, and independence to their rightful place as the cornerstone of Western achievement, in a world filled with prefab, overpriced, purpose-built, rubber-bumpered crap?
Hey, Katz, if you want to do something useful for "The Kids", then quit defending mindless entertainment and start advocating mindful engagement. Ten million zombies playing Quake are not going to fix the problem.
-jhp
/. -- the Free Republic of technology.
I would genuinely like to know just what successes there have been against obvious greed by a corporation in the courts over the last eighteen months or so. I define success as something along the lines of: an impartial judge considers the facts of the case and what implications his or her judgement would have and then tells the corporate entity bringing the action to go and stick it.
Do you guys get that over there occasionally? Can you get rid of judges who are clueless? Do you have any frigging say in the way your country is run at all?
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
However. The draconian IP laws we have in place are indeed destroying our intellectual underpinnings. Think about the video games you played as a kid. Those are protected under copyright 75 plus the life of the author -- bascially your whole life. Many of these games will not survive 75 years. There is no real profit for Atari to re-release a bunch of 2600 games, but at the same time, we're raising the next generation of game designers on copycat games (first person shooters, real-time stragegy, driving, martial arts fighting). I can remember when every game had a very unique strategy, look and feel to it. The ones that didn't, died. If you want to play any of those 2600 games now, the game manufacturers won't sell them to you, and they don't want you to grab them off the net, so you must find an old Atari 2600 somewhere that still works (good luck), with good controllers, and then find the games you want to play. Oh wait, the IP people don't like reseller shops -- remember the flack over used CDs?
Truth of the matter is, be it film, video games, music, books, or software, much of this IP loses it's commercial value within five years. It's the odd thing that maintains it's worth more than 15 (Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, Victor Hugo's Les Miserables). Most of this stuff will not survive for 75 years when it might possibly come out of copyright. They don't want to sell it to you now, because it costs too much for too small a profit. They do want to hang on it, on the off chance it becomes valuable. Only problem is, they are looking at the dollar signs, they have no real interest in preserving history. When these things are lost (and some things are already lost, try to find a good copy of Metropolis), they cannot be regained.
The fact they'd rather clamp down and control content rather than sell us the very thing we're stealing -- well, that's just bad business and we shouldn't protect that with law.
-------------------------------------------------
Apparently the Harry Fox agency didn't like that. And, they ruined lyrics.ch. They tried to change it, and in their zeal for total content control, they made it unusable. Now, you can't print the lyrics, and you can't scroll back to read the ones just displayed, you can't even control the speed of the scrolling. Plus, most songs aren't even listed. Great solution guys. I can only see how lyrics.ch helped promote music, but copyright is king today.
Now, I see they're going to do it with guitar tabs. Nevermind that some of these tabs (as was some of the lyrics on lyrics.ch) are "backward engineered", in that they are other people's interpretations of what the lyrics or tabs might be or probably are. They'll be determined to keep control to the point they'll make their tabs completely unusable. Copyright holders need to look at things in a different light.
Rather than asking how they can keep people from making money off their IP, they need to ask "why are people making money off this?" and "how can I make it better and easier to use, so they like my service better?" I'd be willing to pay a nominal fee for lyrics or tabs or god forbid, mp3s. If and only if, I can do whatever I want with them after I purchase them. Don't cripple them, don't worry about me misusing them. As it is, I'm not buying any intellectual property until these strong-arm tactics are under control.
Copyright law is ruining the intellectual underpinnings of our society.
-------------------------------------------------
The ability to get free tabs makes playing music much easier, which in turn creates more musicians, and makes the recording industry MORE MONEY. If they shut down the tab websites, they'll get back the INCREDIBLY small amount of money from people who'd rather hear a local band perform an artist's song than the artist themself.
Do I have any less desire to see Clapton in concert because I heard FuzzBucket perform "Tears in Heaven"? Absolutley not.
Consult the Copyright Act, 17 U.S.C. s. 106, which provides that the copyright holder owns exclusive rights to reproduction and distribution. With respect to a copyrighted work directly from the original sheet music, a recording or a performance of a copyrighted work, if you record the tablature, and published that result, you have implicated both reproduction and distribution rights. There are some merger issues, but for many tunes, you will run into quite a few walls trying to defend on grounds of noninfringement.
A better claim might be fair use. Much depends on the particular facts of the case; the work, how much is taken; impact on the publishing marketplace; for what purposes the tablature was recorded, and so forth.
Right. Their license requires them to give notice concerning the "accounts" issue. It is the generally feeble efforts of MLB and similar sports organizations to hold on to what's left of the hot news exception.
Nope. That was settled in the Motorola cases not too long ago. There is nothing copyrightable in the subject matter of a sporting event. Of course, you can't simply rebroadcast a particular sportscast, or use excerpts of the play by play commentary -- that (the photography and the content) is most certainly protected.
however, the subject matter of what is shown on the newscast -- that's no violation of copyright.
It remains to be seen, however, whether the common law action for misappropriation would apply. The law varies from state to state whether the action protects contemporaneous rebroadcast of "hot news." But that is another (really hypertechnical, but fun for geek lawyers) issue.
What is clear is that traditional sporting events, itself, is not likely to be protected by copyright. (There may be interesting issues in highly choreographed events, perhaps something like pro wrestlying).
You, my friend, are talking straight out of your ass. If you could implement even a fraction of what you say "wouldn't be a huge project," you would single-handedly show up all of the current experts in the field.
I recommend you read the alt.binaries.sounds.midi FAQ, where the task of converting WAV->MIDI is discussed in depth (section 1.4). This is equivalent to the process you propose, the idea of taking a digital PCM sound file and decomposing it into musical "events." The discussion concludes with the following:
--
So, so much...it opens a new window for every thing you want to do and then at the end, there's no instant access to the song file...you have to put it in the basket. WTF?
Now, if the site rocked and charged micropayments, it might be sweet, but there's just something so perverse about paying for something that is worse than the free alternative.
I guess it's nice to see the system working for somebody...too bad it's not us.
OTOH, if database protection passes, preemption won't offer even the weak shield it currently does...
-- Openlaw: Fighting for fair use and the public domain
Nonsense. Describing something - a plya-by-play of a sporting event, a review of a play, a transcription of a song - in my own words does not violate anyones copyright. My description is my creation. In fact, I automatically hold copyright on my description.
Anyway, I thought these assholes at Harry Fox would have learned their lesson when they went after the orginal OLGA, only to have mirrors spring up all over the place - the same way pressure on Napster has led to things like OpenNap. I said it then and I'll say it now: Music is not a crime.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | http://www.infamous.net/
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Distributing tablature derived from listening to music? That's outrageous! It's almost as bad as communally deciphering and publishing lyrics! These people need to be thrown in jail, along with softcore drug users, and encryption users.
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
please at least show enough respect to quote the entire thing:
In Germany they first came for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me -
and by that time no one was left to speak up.
- Pastor Martin Niemöller
How we know is more important than what we know.
That's great! Now you can close your eyes and pretend the law doesn't exist because there is no way to enforce it. Yah! An alternative, would be to do something about the law rather than just giving up on society.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The common satire:
:)
First they came for the hackers.
But I never did anything illegal with my computer,
so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the pornographers.
But I thought there was too much smut on the Internet anyway,
so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the anonymous remailers.
But a lot of nasty stuff gets sent from anon.penet.fi,
so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for the encryption users.
But I could never figure out how to work PGP anyway,
so I didn't speak up.
Then they came for me.
And by that time there was no one left to speak up.
My google skills are unmatched
How we know is more important than what we know.
Music score is like source code and tablature is like object code and the sound is like the gui! That's why Oasis isn't in jail for rippin' their look and feel off The Beatles.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The funny thing is, the tab thst I have got from OLGA sites have been better than most published sheet music. Yes, sometimes people seem to mistake a Am chord for a C major chord, but lots of popular songs on OLGA have more than one submission, so you can look at each one and decide for your self on which is correct, or combine bits of each.
When I was in high school, I spent $25 (which is alot when you don't have a real job) on a deluxe copy of Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon Tab Book. And guess what? A good deal with it was wrong. The opening of "Brain Damage" is not as complex as the book claimed (it's just D and G7 chords with a FEW extra notes). The cheap version of the same book (just sheet music , no tab) of the same leaves out the solo to Time (among other things) and includes a song called "Wots Uh the Deal" that isn't even on the Dark Side of the Moon album. To be fair, I got a better understanding of how to play "Us and Them", better than I have seen on OLGA, but that seems to be rare.
I have been downloading tab since the days that you had to sniff out FTP sites. I was just starting out and I didn't know a 1-4-5 progression if it bit me on the ass. For a newbie, a lot of songs that I liked were hard to figure out, and the Tab books were watered down versions that were hardly useful to me. How was I to know that using a capo would make the opening part to Jethro Tull's "Thick as a Brick" so easy to play?
Since then I posted a bit to OLGA (no job at the time), mostly Ween and Beck songs. And I loved it when people emailed me back with thanks, or requests to post my stuff on their web sites (which I always agreed to). When I was starting, I didn't even have a computer. I just went down to the college computer labs and printed out what I wanted to learn (using very small fonts to save paper), took it home and got to it. How cheap and easy could you get?
And how the hell is this stealing any money from the artists? Most tabs say ( as well as I did) to listen to th CD to get the timing right, as plain text tab is very limited in showing note lengths. Trying to play a song by using tab and ot having a CD or tape of the music in question is almost impossible. I wated to learn songs on CDs that I PAYED FOR AND OWNED. They (whoever) already got my money. It's just sometimes my ears needed a bit of help playing what I like. What the big idea about that?
Quick personal note: When art forms an industry, and decides to make the public pay for its use, it ceases to be art. Art is that which enriches your soul for no greater price than that of your time.
Example given: Mozart's operas were always shown in paying venues (you had to buy a ticket to see Figaro). Therefore, Mozart's operas are not art. Eh.
An artist is someone who can live out of fresh air and pure aesthetics. Anyone who needs basely material things (such as, say, money) to survive ceases to be an artist.
(Boy, and this is rated +5 insightful...)
Thomas Miconi
Go here and search fo something. Book mark the servernames you get out of the results - many of them are in foreign countries which, if the sites aren't owned by americans, may be more immune to this crap. It's important to do this now because the URL above IS in the good ol' USA, so even tho it's only a search engine, it might get shut down under the same reasoning as Napster.
--
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
I can tell you from personal experience that most of the "official" sheet music that comes out for guitar is pure garbage. Example: I paid a great deal for a Led Zeppelin book to understand "The Rain Song". It was a VERY POOR approximation, in that it didn't even have the correct tuning of the guitar (which is how the strings are tuned, and makes a huge difference in how the song is played and how it SOUNDS). The publishers can take a hike until they produce a quality product at ANY proce (which they've spent 25 years that I know of proving that they can't or won't.
--
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Screw Fox. Also, you can go to Google Advanced Groups Search, enter the song title into the "with the exact phrase" field and enter "alt.guitar.tab" into the "Newsgroup" field, then click "google search" and you're set. Let's see the pricks shut down usenet.
--
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
It is not like hacking in and stealing the sources. If it's like anything it's reverse engineering. It's an interpretation of the song, put on the web for free.
What if I were to play a song I'd learned from an... uuuh... illegal tablature, in my own room, by my self. Would this be like running Win98 compiled from stolen source code?
Anyway I think it's a bad idea comparing it to source code since the code can't be kept a secret, the music is the code, it's never in some sorta binary form.
Or, if the general public doesn't protest too much, then the laws stick around forever and are selectively enforced by the authorities whenever they feel like.
Too bad there's nothing in the Constitution which says that laws which can't be enforced consistently will automatically expire.
http://www.lawmemo.com/ip/sum/iplm/i20001107.htm
And with database treaties, this will probably become even more of an issueDisclaimer: I'm not a lawyer, just interested in the topic.
Although I personally have my doubts as to how much this will help 2600's case, this article is yet case they will be able to refer to in their hearing tommorow. See yesterday's article about the university professor who had to back off due to legal bullying.
The number of times I've consulted on-line, amature tablature for both bass, rhythm, and lead parts cannot be counted. Its a great way to find out how to play songs - especially since no one ever completely gets it "right". Each person's transcription has its own character since we all hear things a little bit differently. It would be a disgrace to musicians everywhere to allow legal hound dogs ruin this tradition over "potential competition" to something I doubt I'd ever use.
Again, someone nuke them now. It seems the only sane thing left to do, other than outlaw lawyers, but that's a little too paradoxical.
One Can Never Own Enough Musical Instruments...
-Legion
-Legion
So if I listen to a song a few times without an instrument in my hands, then walk into a room where I can't hear the original, but do have an instrument, and I work out the TAB from what I remember in my head, then that would constitute a clean room reverse engineering which has been protected by the courts, right?
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WWhhaatt ddooeess dduupplleexx mmeeaann??
This sig intentionally left justified.
lyrics. oh please... some of us like to know what mr. stipe is mumbling in his songs. we're not going to sell the lyrics, we just want to read them. i don't think thats wrong.
tabs. yeah... illegal to play a song that someone else wrote! if not for tabs, i know a lot of people who would never have learned to play a guitar. this is just ridiculous.
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"don't smoke, don't drink, don't fuck
at least i can fucking think"
Minor Threat
If you take away the guitars, then there's no chance of infringement. I can think of many people who need their guitars taken away, and would be happy to provide a list (with home addresses) to facilitate this action.
Or I suppose you could just stop selling strings. That would work too.
you do realize, of course, that most of the tabs you get in books are transcribed by someone hired to figure out the music, not the musicians. a fine example is sunhawk. Just busineses transcribing tab, or even sheet music, and trying to get people to pay for it. A lame concept in and of itself (as most guitarists will get a hell of a lot better by just jamming to the radio rather than playing from tab). And the only reason companies are starting to get pissed is because they can't bear the idea that most people would rather figure the music out themselves than pay for tab.
But who knows, this may make for better guitarists in the long run. Perhaps even revive the lost art of the trained ear.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
i think this is a far cry from some play by play (which, AFAIK, isn't copyright infringement).
1) Anyone who is getting these tabs is usually getting them for personal use. They'll either use them to play when they're bored, or they'll play them when friends come over for shits ang giggles. That, my friend, is definitely fair use. Unless, of course, there is something sinister about playing covers for your friends, and, dear god, not charging them for your private show.
2) Any half-way competent guitarist should be able to figure out any song without use of tablature. Sure, there are some discrepancies(sp) with the way that the song is played, sometimes complete chords are fubar'ed, but - it's really not that difficult to figure out what the musician was doing by listening to a song a few times (hell, i figured out Travis' cover of Hit Me Baby, One More Time because i couldn't find it on the OLGA. The only reason most people use sites like that are because of laziness, not because of some sinister desire to undermine the profit margin of the music industry. Outlawing sites like the OLGA isn't going to stop cover bands, and it's sure as hell not going to stop anyone who can play anything more than power cords. (Subnote: It's a good song, and no, i'm not gay).
3. Most importantly, these songs were "reverse engineered" so to speak. 99.9% of the tab you see on places like the OLGA weren't written by anyone who had anything to do with the music industry. They were written by average joes like you and me who decided to help others out. They weren't, and aren't, doing anything more than providing easy instructions for a product that doesn't come with an instruction manual.
In that sense, the music industry is trying to outlaw do-it-yourself manuals. Why don't we just take the next step and outlaw Chilton's car guides and Time-Life Home Improvement books.
Quick personal note: When art forms an industry, and decides to make the public pay for its use, it ceases to be art. Art is that which enriches your soul for no greater price than that of your time.
FluX
After 16 years, MTV has finally completed its deevolution into the shiny things network
"It is seldom that liberty of any kind is lost all at once." -David Hume
what if i don't have a cd.
Then go buy the CD. Or rip the tape or the vinyl.
some people don't have cd players.
If your home computer is old enough not to have a CD-ROM drive, it probably doesn't have a large enough hard drive to store many MPEG audio files.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Music score is like source code and tablature is like object code and the sound is like the gui!
Music score is like source code. Tablature is another form of music score, and so is a MIDI file. The .wav or .mp3 is a binary, statically linked with the instruments, unlike MODs which are dynamically linked to their instruments.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Now you can close your eyes and pretend the law doesn't exist because there is no way to enforce it.
Laws that are too much trouble to enforce either cease to be enforced or are repealed. This war on sharing is similar to the war on drugs and the old war on alcohol (Prohibition era); it just doesn't work. There are other other ways to compensate artists, such as the Street Performer Protocol in which the full version of a work is released if and only if enough paid orders for it are received.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Or, why not apply an accoustic-analysis procedure and create a file that, when fed to the appropriate program, reproduces the music almost exactly how it was played!
This is MPEG layer 3 audio compression in a nutshell (sorry, O'Reilly).
Still free?
No. Look at the deep sh*t Napster is in right now.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Clearly the poster has never played with FFTs (Fast Fourier Transforms for frequency analysis). The problem with a Fourier transform is that you must collect a large number of samples in order to get reasonable frequency resolution, unfortunately, that causes you to loose time resolution.
Most rock music is composed at a maximum resolution of about sixteenth notes (ignore complex guitar solos for now); decent beat detection will find the note grid. For a song at about 120 quarter per minute (Nirvana), this gives 1/8 second per grid space, or over 5,000 samples. 4,096 samples is more than enough to get a decent spectral resolution in an FFT. The problems discussed in MIDI FAQ may not apply as much to rock because you don't have 100 layers of instruments on top of each other (more like just drums, bass, three guitar notes, and vocals) or that many effects (just reverb and various sorts of harmonic distortion).
Will I retire or break 10K?
then the laws stick around forever and are selectively enforced by the authorities whenever they feel like
Except authorities who enforce forgotten laws end up on DumbLaws.com and are embarrassed out of their... Next point?
there's nothing in the Constitution which says that laws which can't be enforced consistently will automatically expire.
In fact, there's nothing in the Constitution that requires copyright itself to expire. The "for limited times" in U.S. Const. 1.8.8 is relatively meaningless in the face of the Eldred v. Reno^H^H^H^HAshcroft decision, setting a precedent allowing for already nearly perpetual copyright to be extended even longer. This is a bad thing.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The tabs on the site are transcribed by people that listened to the music.
But they're derivative works of the original musical composition.
This can be compared to running a program and then making your own that is similar without looking at the source code.
Cloning software is legal, but cloning music is not. They differ in the amount of paraphrase (copying of ideas with new expression) between the original and the copy. Copying the behavior of a program is copying ideas and not restricted under copyright law. Raw music itself, on the other hand, contains hardly any content that could be considered "idea" (you can be sued for four notes), and the lyrics that normally accompany tablature are generally copied verbatim.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I certainly, in the hundreds of gigs I've played, have never been required to list by the dollar and dime which of the popular slop I am playing I owe royalties on.
I'm afraid you have. The fact that you haven't done it doesn't relieve you of the responsibility. If you're ever playing copyright songs for money, there's a fee per song. Larger organisations may wangle a "block booking", but I'd ask to see the documents b4 I'd trust them.
If you don't pay your taxes and you don't get any letters chasing you for them, does that mean you're no longer liable to pay tax? Of course not. Same thing here.
Of course, most part-time pub bands will get away without paying the royalties. But if Metallica cover "Ecstacy of Gold" by Ennio Morricone then they'll be paying a fee per recording and per performance to use that song, unless Morricone (or his publishers) make it public domain. Harry Fox is merely the collection agency, contracted by the music companies to collect royalties owing to songwriters. How they collect and who they collect from is their business - at some point it'll cost more to chase all the little pub bands than they'd get back in royalties.
I agree the time period is too long (myself, I'd look at around 10 years for copyright of anything, maybe 20 at most), but that's the way the rules work ATM, right or wrong.
Grab.
They won't have to pay to buy the tab, but they'll still have to pay if they perform it for money. If they don't charge for it, they don't pay. But Metallica would pay to perform and record "Ecstacy of Gold", Mike Flowers Pops would pay to perform and record "Wonderwall", etc.
Grab.
No, it's more like outlawing sports spectators from giving a play by play account of a sporting event. Which, guess what, that's copyright infringement.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
Or, why not apply an accoustic-analysis procedure and create a file that, when fed to the appropriate program, reproduces the music almost exactly how it was played! Still free?
Oh wait...
If you play guitar and can't transpose a riff between keys (especially when you've got the original to compare to, and it's obviously wrong) then you should probably just give up.
Idiot.
If a performer adheres to the letter of the law, and profits (or even loses money, but still takes in some revenue) by publicly performing a song, the artist IS compensated by way of union dues, ASCAAP, BMI, et. al.. That is definitely NOT getting something for nothing. If, on the other hand, someone gets the tab to figure out all or part of a song stricty for personal enjoyment, and not to make money with, how is that taking anything away from the artists?
I'd rather you debate the points of the discussion, rather than rehash the same tired arguments again and again or brag about what you've "contributed". I am programmer and musician myself, although I have not contributed more than bug reports and testing time to the Open Source community (mostly due to a lack of free time, not desire). The database company that I work for does promote Linux as our primary development and server paltform, though.
My work aside, how do you justify the belief that using tabs from people who themselves have NOT profitted from providing them strtictly for learning purposes is taking anything away from artists like the ones you mention? Again, I have already stated that this is completely different from distributing unauthorized mp3s, so the last line of your argument completely disregards an area where I've already made clear that I am totally in favor of the artist getting paid. These guys aren't distributing the songs themselves (like mp3s, which would be almost impossible to justify as learning materials), but educational materials...
Also, most of the musicians good enough to be booking paying gigs rarely have to rely on tabs, anyway... at least ones that I'd be willing to pay to see. There's just not that big of a legitimate market for tabs among those calibre musicians. I'd personally just as soon go out and by a book from the music store if I wanted to learn 8 or 9 Pink Floyd songs... but if I'm stuck on just a riff or two of one song, and I take a peak at a tab to get a better idea of how to play it, I've not taken food from the mouths of these artists, because I'd have never spent 19.95 to learn that one riff, and nor would the "starving artists" themselves.
There are two major products that come out of Berkel
I am so sick of laws that have no purpose other than to enrich a few scumbags by creating artificial markets:
How can executives at these companies not look at themselves in the mirror each morning and think, "I am a disgusting parasitic leech of a human being"?
I just don't know. Maybe they just need a reminder.
I can always find the TAB I want at Harmony Central's search engine and the search target always seems to be hosted on a different site all the time.
Of course, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. This applies to their dreams of creating a sample-based music world as well. :-P
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
As a lot of posters have already pointed out, removing free tablature is actually going to hurt budding muscians, and will actually rob the recording industry of musical talent in the future.
"So", the outraged Slashdotters say. "The RIAA is just shooting themself in the foot! By nipping tomorrow's musicians in the bud, they're just depriving themselves of musicians they can make money off of tomorrow!"
Tempting argument, but that assumes the recording industry wants musicians tomorrow. I, for one, feel that they're just moving towards a sample-based recording industry. There are already trillions of hours of recorded music out there; they don't need to go through the inefficient process of actually finding musicians who can play music anymore. It's far more efficient for them to just licsense samples from their back catalogs to people who want to create "new" "music".
This business model also has the added bonus of keeping pesky start-up labels out of the game, because they obviously don't have huge catalogs of samplable, licensable music to rely upon for income.
Holy fucking shit... this post started out as a very sarcastic attempt at humor, but then it actually started to make sense while I was writing it! Help! Calgon, please take me away!!!
http://www.bootyproject.org
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
BTW Harry Fox is about the protection of the songwriter.
Was I supposed to laugh at this?
As if this was part of the issue. I program computers for a living.
I think you should work for the next year, with only an advance, then at the end of the year not be paid anymore.
I think I have. Actually, I didn't get paid anything that year. I subsisted on the good will of friends.
ho are you to decide that since you can copy their work it has no value, I CAN go to your house with a rifle and take everything I want from your house.
God DAMN it that is not the same at all. Where do you get this shit? You've got to be the most irrational person I've met all day. How the fuck does two people trading tablature take money out of the artists' pocket? How? When is the amateur guitarist going to go down to the store and find copies of tab somehow made by other amateurs? How is tablature considered to be "ripping off." I would like to point out that if I couldn't get the tab I'd just pick it out by ear. I can pick out just about anything I want to by ear. Am I stealing from the artists if I just bypass the entire process and DO IT MYSELF? That is really what's the issue here. Let me repeat it so you can see it, and have it tatooed to your fucking forehead so you don't forget it: IF YOU WANT SOMEONE TO HEAR YOUR WORK YOU MUST EXPOSE IT TO THEIR EARS AT SOME POINT! There is the associated risk that they may imitate you. And you might not make a dime out of that transaction. But it is not neccesary to nickel and dime your audience for the pleasure of your work. Doing so will just piss them off and drive them away. If they enjoy you they will support you. They will arrive at your shows and buy your t-shirts and hang on your every word. If they do not you will have to find something else to do for a living. That is where I am today. But you must accept the risk like everyone else, and get the hell used to it.
Do you know any artists? DO you have an ounce of talent?
This is sloppy logic and pointless. Some of us may be musicians, and some may not. For the record, I note that I have been playing the guitar for eighteen years. I have been there and done all that and have subsisted on the meager givings a musician at the bottom of the rung can make. Whether I have or not is not the point. We are not arguing about who is a musician here.
LAst time I checked a small time musician on the road spends there day as follows. . . all for less than $100,
Ah, the pity. It's a sad day when you can't sympathize with someone's arguments because of how ragged their clothing is. But we aren't arguing about that hypothetical situation either.
In other posts you have pretty much followed the slippery-slope-leads-to-hell and pity-us-poverty-stricken-musician threads to their bitter, terrible ends, and yet I have somehow failed to bite. Let's examine why:
If you're a working musician who makes your money solely from touring and have yet to cut a CD deal, it's not likely you have anxious teenagers picking it out and posting the tab online.
If you are a published songwriter or author, where exactly do you publish tablature? The last time I went into a music store, I found lots of sheet music, printed on traditional staves. I didn't find much in the way of tablature. Remember that tablature is printed by people who by and large cannot read traditional five-line staves of music. The only place I've found genuine tablature is in guitar magazines, and if your music is popular enough that it's getting transcribed in Guitar World, you aren't exactly salivating over the 0.03 royalty check that comes from each sale thereof.
If you are are selling CD's, only then do you have enough fan-level interest to start seeing tabs of your material show up on the internet. At that point, you have already sold a $12-$20 CD to most of the people listening to your songs. In order to make the tab useful (remember, there is no rhythmic notation in the tab beyond the bare mention of the bar lines) they have to get a copy of the song. That is a transaction you can benefit from.
So from where I sit, tablature is not competing with anything musicians are selling today anyway. This activity that we now see on the internet has been going on for years and years anyway. I know, because remember I have been doing this for eighteen years, long before there was a world wide web. I traded tabs with dozens of guitar-playing friends at school. None of us intended to starve the poor members of Led Zepplin or Rush with our tabs, and even if we were, the transaction we were performing was invisible and untraceable, and therefore any law against it was completely unenforcable.
Finally, you fail to address the primary point of this all anyway, which is that the users and creators of this tablature feel that it is perfectly justifiable fair use. Copyright draws a boundary between the private ownership of IP and the public's use of it, and as copyrights have been increased in an effort to nickel-and-dime the consumer out of as much cash as possible, the public's benefit from these works (the entire reason copyrights are granted in the first place) has diminished. In this case it is the very concrete loss of the right to learn from and imitate art and one's culture. All art is imitation. Every artist in every era has imitated the work of his predecessors. If artists of today are so unwilling to share their work with students, they may derive from this greed an unexpected effect:
If they (or their handlers) are unwilling to grant the modicum of freedom with their works that is fair use, quotation, and educational, they may find themselves omitted from historical record. The medium on which most music is recorded, nowdays, is CD. Once the CD stops becoming popular (i.e., the kids who listened to it grow up) the only way to preserve it is to start copying it. But if it's illegal (and indeed impossible) to copy the CD, it won't make its way into educational materials, won't be studied as a period in music history, and in a hundred years or so, it will all but vanish from our culture. So the artists who want their kids and great grand kids and great great grandkids to be the only ones allowed to copy their material: think carefully before you wish for that. Your material is already, in my opinion, in grave danger of vanishing from the face of the earth altogether.
Finally, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and the surest indication of success. If no one imitates your songs, they probably aren't that popular. And if no band ever tries to clone your act (by first learning your songs, then imitating them), you probably won't make it into anyone's hall of fame, either.
It's the copyright holder's choice and publishing the tabs without permission is the equivalent to hacking into Microsoft's computers, stealing the source code to Win98 and posting it online for the world to see.
God this analogy is fucking weak. First of all, as people trying to copy-protect music have discovered, if you want someone to hear your music, eventually you have to unpack the data and let it reach their ears. You have to expose yourself to copying if you want to have a business at all.
Secondly, if you want to have music, you have to have musicians. Musicians who don't go to the Juliard school of music usually don't get a lot of either money or encouragement. To learn how to play the easiest method is to learn someone else's songs. Right now I'm doing that for a student of mine. She has brought me CD's she would like to play, and I am learning the songs and transcribing them for her. If I were not doing this she would be subjecting herself to a ludicrous game of hunt-the-music. There is no way in hell all of the sheet music to all of the CD's in the world can be published. Even when it is it's frequently not accurate. I've got a Rush book which is filled with errors and omissions, and it's all arranged on two staves, as if some pianist would sit down and churn through "Limelight."
If musicians are unable to learn songs they know, they will surely never progress to writing songs, and the Harry Fucking Fox Agency will have no one to "protect" from copyright infringement.
I think transcribing a tab for amateur musicians' edification easily falls under fair use. It's used to illustrate a point or as an educational tool, or for hobbyists to share amongst one another. It is not demonstrably taking money out of someone's pocket -- let's face it, what 16-year-old kid has eight bucks to blow on learning a single song? If that had been my option back then I would have simply stuck to learning it myself.
This is really just the gigantic fist of a gigantic corporate monolith, squashing that which it does not comprehend. No good will come of it, I guarantee. If amateur tab is driven off the web, it will show up in furtive emails and newsgroup postings instead. It will get encrypted, and it will be impossible to trace or control.
Let's ask George Harrison. I'm sure he's got a highly sarcastic reply.
Seriously, there are only seven available chords in any given key anyway. I ii iii IV V vi and vii. Most rock musicians to my knowledge do not bother with vii as it's highly dissonant and hard to play on a guitar besides. Almost every song you will hear on the radio alternates betwee I and V and IV, unless you listen to the "alternative" station in your area, where you will hear fucked up minor chords in no key in particular.
Shifting the key doesn't make much difference except to people with perfect pitch. A large number of alternative groups drop their guitars down to eb or d (nirvana, korn, etc) anyway.
Chordless riffs (the opening of "Day Tripper" if you're over 40, or the opening of Rush "Limelight" or Ozzy's "Crazy Train" if you're an '80's metalhead, or to PJ's "Jeremy" if you're an alterna-dude) qualify as melody, and you really couldn't disguise them without ruining them. If you flattened the G in Day tripper to an F# to put it in the same key as the rest of the riff it would just barely be recognizable as the wrong riff. Alter any other note in the riff by a semitone and it becomes cacophany. Alter it by more than a semitone and it becomes increasingly difficult to play.
add in new notes (according to a map),
That would definitely obscure things, but only if done in a random way. You can add trills and grace notes to most existing songs and you'll just sound like you're showing off.
and change the tempo
Since tablature doesn't contain rhythm, this won't make any difference.
Although, now that this interesting fact has re-occurred to me, I wonder if tab can be seen as infringing at all? Since it doesn't contain that vital third dimension in music, the rhythm, they can't really be considered as a copy of the music. It's one reason why I don't use tab anymore, becase most bass parts are rhythmic, not melodic, and tab can only show me so many times that I play an E for eighteen mind-numbing measures.
Anyway, what I think is far more likely is that the greed-driven activity of lawyers will once again drive a harmless activity underground, make more previously harmless people into angry dissidents, fester discontent in our society, foster disrespect for the law in general, and push us all one more step closer to a societal collapse. Thanks, Harry Fox Agency.
You're already pretty dull. If you cannot view music and art as anything but property, you haven't grasped their fundamental worth anyway.
Yesterday I rented the Rocky and Bullwinkle movie. It was supposed to be entertaining to the kids, but it was kind of flat. After the movie we watched the "deleted scenes" as my son calls them. The daughter of Jay Ward, creator of the original series, apparently had started to try to make the movie almost immediately after his death in 1989. Her description of the film was a "fine, family oriented property." I don't know about you, but when I go to see a film, I don't consider myself to be viewing a property. That's what I do when I go looking for a house. I can't buy a film from the maker. I can buy a copy of it. But the real payback, for any person with genuine creativities, is ultimately not the money. The money is not why I create. I do not write songs for money, I do not write essays or books for money. I do them because they need to be done. I have invested thousands of dollars in musical instruments because I need to play them. Not because I expect to make money off them. I do not collect bass guitars because I expect to sell them in twenty years. I have them because I need them like a drug addict needs heroin, or a fourteen-year-old needs to jack off. It's an unstoppable urge that has no reason and no excuse. My 1973 Rickenbacker 4001 has a sound that I FUCKING NEED. I sit at my job all day and sometimes I can feel the strings beneath my fingers. It relieves my tension. I tap on office furniture with my right hand to the rhythm of songs. I fret imaginary notes with my left hand when no one's looking. I whistle in the elevator and harmonize to the songs I hear in my head.
And I own every single note I play or write. I own it all, more truly than I own my house and my cars and all the things inside them. I own the fruits of my intellectual labor because they are original to me and clearly mine. When I play someone a recording of me, they never doubt that it is me because that's my voice singing on the recording. When I show someone an essay or story I have written they never question whether I copied it from the Internet because they recognize my voice in the words.
And it is for these reasons that I find the entire concept of intellectual property to be, well, fucking absurd.
At that point we might as well blow out our brains
What would make me want to blow out my brains would be a world where no one could talk about music, or literature, without a plethora(tm) of (c) idiotic trademarks(r) and Capitalized Trendy Words, and Licensing fee$ interfering. When art becomes all about money, it becomes prostitution, and artists become whores. Look no further than Hollywood for what happens when it becomes about the money. Once in a very long while an independent filmmaker comes along and turns the industry on its ear, by making genuinely inspired, original art for no other reason than the joy of it. The year following, we see eight or ten shameless, lifeless ripoffs following in its wake.
the idea of completely free IP sickens me
Free IP didn't stop Virgil from writing the Aneid. Bare substinence living didn't stop Mozart from writing some of the most brilliant music of all time. Hand-to-mouth returns on their efforts never stopped the Van Goghs or the Edgar Allan Poes. And as thousands of slashdotters will immediately attest to, lack of profits do not stop contributors from putting their mark on the Linux source code. Intellectual efforts are created because someone needs to do it. Creativity is beyond business models or investor expectations. If you don't understand how that works, well I pity you that you've never had the fire inside you. There's nothing like it in the world.
Does prohibiting the distribution of amateur-created guitar tabs serve this purpose? Would the extra income generated by having exclusive guitar-tab-creation rights result in musicians producing more music? And if so, would the public benefit more from that increase than they would lose from giving up the right to create and distribute their own guitar tabs?
Unless the answer to both questions can be shown to be "yes" (and shown convincingly), people should be free to create and distribute their own guitar tabs. (Note that I'm not talking about what current law says, I'm talking about what it should say.)
TheFrood
If you say "I'll probably get modded down for this..." then I will mod you down.
Tablature may also fall under this catagory.
As a citizen of the U.S., I'm pissed.
As a human being, I'm outraged.
As a guitarist, I'm fucking homicidal.
To think that anyone would PAY for a guitar/bass/drum/keyboard/whatever tab, is beyond me. Personally, when I'm trying to figure out a song, if there's a part that just doesn't sound right, I look up the tab to see the correct (or semi-correct) fret.
While it may not be _too_ much of an inconvieniance for me, I know as a beginner, you look for a tab _then_ try to figure it out for yourself. By putting a system in place where you must pay for tabs, most people will not pay, and therefore never learn.
In the name of profits.
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#nohup cat
I see a lot of people saying tabs:music::source code:programs. However, I can tell that most of the people making these statements has never played by a tab they got off the internet.
You see, depending on the tab writer (and the tuning of his guitar, amp settings, skill, etc), the tab itself is not^H^H^H never 100% accurate. This holds true especially when a song uses something more complicated like alternate tunings, artifical harmonics, effects, etc. In my experience with tabs, they vary from a 50% to 99% accuracy. Most get the main body of the song right, but then lose accuracy on a solo, bridge or the like.
Anyway, I'm pointing this out because in order to show that any given tab you pull off the internet will not be like source code because it will never be 100% accurate (I have seen exceptions, but those are few and far between). Therefore, it's not the same as the original work. You could even go so far as to call it a remix. Whatever you call it, it's not the same, and therefore cannot (or atleast should not) be held under the same law.
My guitar wants to kill your lawyer.
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#nohup cat
If posters think that music publishers should not have the right to be the only source of sheet music for a song they own, then that is a *good* and *different* point. But the fact is they do have that right, and Harry Fox is just protecting that right. If you don't like it, then get the law changed--I'll help you..
If you transcribe a song for yourself or your band mates to jam on, then that is fair use, if you publish the tabulature on the Web, you are publishing the sheet music and, like it or not, your are infringing on someone else's rights.
It is easy to pretend that you are fighting the System and the Man, but the reality is the music copyrights are most needed by small powerless musicians to protect themselves against the large corporations. For example, these assocated music copyright laws are the only thing that help early black musicians recover part of the huge amount of revenues they generated for the companies that screwed them.
If you want to take away these rights, what recourse do the individual, non-corporate musicians have when MegaLabel wants to absorb all music into there online database that you have to pay to subscribe to? As an independent musician, I wouldn't want some large corporation making money off of me, and I would want to be able to stop that from happening, but without those laws, I couldn't.
Thank you for posting the correct quote with attribution. I was about to, but you got there first. I appreciate it.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Don't get the cheapest thing you can find, take the electrics coverplate off and see that you aren't buying plywood- buy a solid body electric, made of whole wood instead of plywood- You can see the plys as you look inside the electrics cavity.
Then, take it to the local guitar shop and have them put strings on it, adjust it, and tune it.
When you go to the pawn shop, take a friend who plays guitar with you. He can play it through an amp and you can decide if you like the sound of the guitar... and he can tell you if it's any good or not.
A host is a host from coast to coast, but no one uses a host that's close
Other songs that have similar chord changes are between thenselves are: "Heart and Soul", "Last Kiss", "Stand By Me", "D'yer Myker", and most of "Grease".
Also Check out Rage Against the Machine's "Wake Up" from the Matrix soundtrack and Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir".
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
The recording and other content companies will form a system, which uses a real time black hole list. The content black hole(TM)would block all Internet traffic to the offending site. Once this is established, the recording and other companies will then sue small ISPs first then significantly larger ISPs under the theory that the ISP's are not using the "best methods" of preventing copyright infringement. They will state that the ISP's in fact are encouraging infringement and thus should be liable for doing so. With the current judicial system, such a system would probably pass muster by the courts. This sadly should not be the case. ISP's should be entitled to common carrier status. This would mean that the ISPs are not liable for traffic passing over internet links owned by them. As it stands now the framework that the DMCA and other content provider love-in legislation has provided leaves ISP's in the position of enforcement police. Write your congressmen and women and encourage them to take a close look at the current situation. The Slashdot and other online activist are good at talking online however it is the voices of the content industries, which are the loudest to our government.
:P
--
When I'm good I'm very good, when I'm bad I'm better, But when I'm evil you better run
"GET / HTTP/1.0" 200 51230 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; Setec Astronomy)"
Since when did interpreting a song or a guitar solo come to mean copyright infringement? If i publish my interpretation of a band's lyrics, is that infringement? Is it an infringement to analyze a poem? How is a tablature any different? By giving people easy and free access to tabs, the industry could actually help popularize the music. Of course, any half-decent guitarist wouldnt depend on tabs, but sometimes, they are convenient, cheap and fast. Period. Its not as if someone's gonna make a boat-load of cash by publishing (often hilariously incorrect) tabs. For the more serious, discerning players, the choice of buying a full-blown sheet music is *always* there. But let's be realistic here too. How much sheet music does one need to play rock and roll? If I can get the basic chord progressions, I can play. If I want to learn the solo, I will noodle around till I get it right. If it sounds really complex, I will ask a friend. If I dont have a friend who knows it, I will ask guitarists who have internet access. The real problem, it seems to me, is that the law enforcers are unable to understand that these tab sites are not any different from me calling up a friend to ask him about some tabs. Another question - would the law-enforcers call it illegal if someone ran a "tabs-by-email" service for free?
There is no way in hell this will hold out in court. If this guy can prove that nbci is working to eliminate competition, it will immediately be thrown out. Its abuses such as this one is why America should join Canada and other countries in legal system reforms. Basically in a reformed system, an abusive company that practices unreasonable prosecution has to pay the legal defense cost of the guy being sued. With all the news about the SDMI research being stoped because just one suit by the mpaa will cost alot of money to defend, makes a strong arguement for it.
The guys like NBCI and the MPAA will always ( finicially ) win because they have big pockets. If your a defendent and win a lawsuit what do you gain? You just lose your house, some cars and perhaps your childs college fund just to prove that you did nothing wrong.
Big corporations have nothing but gain. IF they lose the case it doesn't hurt them finicially. IF they win it rewards them with bigger profits.
All the corps do is point and they win hands down every time. IT so unfair.
http://saveie6.com/
Well the record company's goin' out of business
They price the records too damn high
And the boys in the band could use some assistance
Well the record company's goin' out of business
They price the records too damn high
And the boys in the band could use some assistance
Get a daytime job just to get by
Well the P.D.'s they won't play the record
They're too worried about that book
And the D.J's they all hate the song
But they're in love with the hook
Chorus
So na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na
I bet you've heard this song before
Na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na
Take your cocaine and hit the door
Well folk rock, punk rock, power pop music
Turned out to be the latest trends
And ther ain't no more progressive music
The business has put it to an end
Ol' "Rolling Stone" has gathered some moss
No they ain't what they used to be
They try to look like "Look" with their political pages
And advertising all over T.V.
Appariently in 1983 he knew that the business would put alot of things to an end. Go figure.
Now, we got a business who wants to sell digital sheet music and kill off other simular services who offer simular stuff (albeit not exact) for FREE!!! The great thing about OLGA is that first its free, and the tablature isn't THAT BAD. Its enough to give you a feel for the chord structure, and some of them are very very close to the real thing.
Tablature is a great way for a beginner to get his feet wet playing guitar. I've personally used OLGA for a number of songs that i wanted to learn how to play, and it's a great service with a good deal of tab selections to choose from.
Most guitarists know there are songbooks out by popular artists with the exact chord structures (in the form of sheet music) in them. You need to pay for this, but it's worth it, if you want to play the song exactly how it was written musically. And i have bought a few.
However, services like OGLA, I use on the side (and a good bit) when I don't want to spend $10-$20 dollars for a whole freakin book of sheet music. I just want to learn one damn song, not the artists whole album in sheet music. It's a waste of money, unless your a big fan of that artist.
Why can't they just advertise their service by saying "it's the ORGNINAL and EXACT reproduction of the artist's music" or something to that effect instead of just crushing the tab sites? How are sites like OGLA competition? They know they got a better, truer product, why not just hype that and be done with it?...It'd be too damn easy.
- NetGyver
"A penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off."
A Penny for my thoughts? Here's my two cents. I got ripped off!
...downloading the MP3 is wrong.
...downloading the lyrics is wrong.
...downloading the Tabs is wrong.
What's next? Buying the CDs online from any store other than their website? Downloading wallpapers and WinAmp skins of your favorite artists? Someone send them a clue, please.
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Tongue-tied and twisted, just an earth-bound misfit, I
Learning to fly, Pink Floyd.
Exactly right. Somebody should mod that comment up.
It seems quite obvious that publishing sheet music online without approval is a copyright violation, no different from publishing somebody's novel or poetry. (As you point out, if one objects to copyrights in general, and intellectual property rights, that's a totally different argument. It's also a tough fight considering the current worldwide body of law.)
Publishing tablature is the same thing as publishing [other] sheet music, except it's intended for musical illiterates. There's no shame in being unable to read music, but surely the distinction between traditional musical notation and tablature isn't so much greater than the difference between HTML and ASCII text. "It isn't a copyright violation because I published in in Arial instead of Garamond."
Sheesh.
By all means, publish tablature to your heart's content for music you have a right to distribute -- things in the public domain and things you write yourself. We can always use more new music. Just don't steal from the guy who chooses to publish music for a living through resources like Harry Fox.
JMHO -- Trevor
-- We all have enough strength to endure the misfortunes of other people. La Rochefoucauld
huh?
So if I write down the chords I think I'm hearing its infringement?
How do you figure that?
If publishers can't produce higher quality tablature/sheet music than I can for free, then they deserve to go out of business.
They've got access to the artists who WROTE the piece, for heaven sakes. They're a business, so presumably they have some operating cash and employees they can put into getting it just right -- and the value of getting it just right is enough that I'd pay a buck or two for that, certainly.
But the strange thing is, there's a lot of tab/music out there that's sold for free that really sucks; I can produce a better variation by listening to the song and transcribing it myself.
So publishers: compete on quality. Compete on cool art and glossy covers and scribblings done in the artist's handwriting. Compete on actually selling a pre-printed and pre-bound product. In other words, actually provide a service for your fees. But don't whine that you can't compete with a bunch of amateurs who do this in their spare time.
--
Libertarianism is rich wolves and poor sheep playing gambler's ruin for dinner.
Man, half the time I'm not even sure I'm looking at the right song.
And yes, someone nuke NBCi.
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
The band doesn't need tablature, Zico. They already know the song because they created it. Once you've learned the verse chorus and maybe an intro riff, if you can't play it from memory you will probably be kicked out of the band. "Writing" it usually refers to charting the lyrics out. The guitar solo is usually, like, improvised. Most rock bands don't read music, so they likely won't have a nice score.
The site is created by listeners who pick the part out by ear and write it down. Don't be such an uninformed tool.
I like your "official publications" line. It plays right into the idea that there is only one source anyone can have for music and culture. The "official" one. Do I have to get a license to be an "official" musician, too?
One day I feel I'm ahead of the wheel / the next it's rolling over me / I can get back on / I can get back on
Buy something cheap, then after you get better and realize you actually want to play, then there is only one choice
GIBSON LES PAUL!!!!
The best! guitar on the planet.
Arathres
I love my iBook. I use it to run Linux!
stainless steel
Next some pushy recording industry group will decide that singing in the shower obviously violates precious Intellectual Property rights. I just wonder how they'll enforce it.
Isn't it ironic that the RIAA and other groups are raining on everybody's parade, yet they artists are getting screwed just as badly as the fans? Methinks they are exercising their fictitious yet inalienable right to profit without limit.
Ewige Blumenkraft!
Ewige Blumenkraft!
What if someone were to change all of the tabs in some musical way? Like.. shift all of the notes up or down, add in new notes (according to a map), and change the tempo. In other words, do enough to the song so that if played, it wouldn't sound much like the original. Would the court find these tabs to be in violation? What if there were a utility available to convert the tab back to the one the author intended? Would this utility become a circumvention utility?
How close does a song have to be to the original before it can be declared the original?
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
That's easy. They will get a bribed judge to mandate that all showerhead manufacturers build surveillence microphones and GPS units into each of their showerheads. When installed, these will enable the RIAA to monitor all sound emissions created in your shower, and locate your position for purposes of prosecution should you dare to hum the tune of the newest Brittney Spears song while cleansing yourself.
-----
Bow before my sig, for it is good.
So I should be arrested for copyright infringement for being able to identify a chord I hear? How ever will bands and orchestras be able to stay in tune? The next step is outlawing tuning forks!
What's next? Elementary school students can't sound out a difficult word for fear of infringing upon the author's copyright? Best Buy won't be able to use an album's name in its advertisements without consent of the copyright holder? Will Microsoft sue me for typing the word "microsoft" in my browser in an attempt to get to microsoft.com?
You are way off base. Tab writers do not "hack" into the songwriter's secret archive, get exact note-by-note tabs and then post it to the net. They reverse-engineer the song through listening and figuring out what the notes are BY EAR.
By the way, you are aware that even tab publishers [Cherry Lane, et al] do not guarantee note-for-note accuracy?
"The problem with our economy is that our budget is balanced by people who aren't" - A.E.N.
Guitartabs.cc Lots of guitar tabs.
Wholenote Guitar tabs and a MIDI guitar tuner.
Chordfind use this site to find out how to play any chord.
"the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached to it." - Grandpa Simpson
If tablatures are outlawed, only outlaw garage bands will be able to cover Stairway To Heaven.
"Anonymous Coward" is for whistleblowers, not unpopular opinions.
Nope, not me, I must be someone else...
or a 'clift notes' version of the song... Unlike sheet music, TAB indicates nothing of timing, speed, feel, etc. Given that, it'd be virtually impossible to simply pick up a .tab file and start sight-reading it and playing it, without having listened to the original song (over and over again). I'd venture to say that most people wishing to learn a song by TAB, actually own that particular cd, so they -can- listen to it over and over to get it right.
*shrug*