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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.
> 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!
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.
>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
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!
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.
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.
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:
--
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?
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?
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.
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.
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
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?
------
WWhhaatt ddooeess dduupplleexx mmeeaann??
This sig intentionally left justified.
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.
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
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?
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.
To me, this is one of the most crippling arguments in the whole MP3/napster/whatever debate.
Music sales have been going up for about, hrmm, the last 50 years or more. This is due to the fact that there is constantly more and more music out there to buy. Trying to calculate the number of sales lost, however, is no simple task. This is because every single album will have different sales. Because the market relies largely on people's tastes (okay, that's a stretch), there is no real way of projecting the sales for any particular album, hence no way to calculate losses.
I am pretty sure that there are many people out there who have not bought an album/single or two because they have it as mp3s.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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"
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.
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.
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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
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!
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.
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Bow before my sig, for it is good.
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.