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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.
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!
*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!
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.
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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.
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.
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"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...
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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.