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Songfile (lyrics.ch) Trails Off
dave256 writes: "I was recently wandering about looking for some lyrics and CD track listings, and going to my good old standby, lyrics.ch (and summarily suffering through the redirection to songfile), I noticed a notice:'On September 30, 2001, the International Lyrics Server website will be closed and all lyrics will be removed from the Songfile web site.
Thank you for your support, and we appreciate your past patronage.
Please direct any questions or inquiries regarding this change to lyrics@harryfox.com.' Who was this masked harryfox.com? Boy was I (not) surprised. I for one will miss the old beast."
The lyrics.ch site has survived some tough times before, so perhaps this isn't really its end.
In its original form, Lyrics.ch caused me to buy more music than I ever had before. Not even Napster gets me that motivated to go out and buy CD's (although the RIAA makes it very hard to get motivated about being overcharged, but I digress). It was very easy for me to search for a song from over 15 years ago and find out what it was. With that knowledge I would look for the best priced CD containing that song.
After Lyrics.ch got raided it had no use. For a long time there were no lyrics up. When they did get lyrics back the site was rendered sterile. There were so few lyrics you had a better chance using Yahoo! or Altavista (no Google back then) to find the lyrics.
When Songfile took over it was no better. Many lyrics are up, but I don't want to liscence a song just to know if it is the one I am thinking of.
Is it just me, or does the RIAA make you feel like you're being shat upon? Almost any other industry would be enthused people used your service for such things.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
Yeah good ol' Harry Fux pulled the same crap with The OnLine Guitar Archive. I haven't been there in a while, but looks like they're up and running succesfully. I checked their About Page and at the bottom it mentions they need funds to pursure a case about the legality of "by ear" transcriptions. I've donated in the past and I think I'll do it again now...
Since some folks are having problems getting to the site, here are some addresses:
clientrelations@harryfox.com
licensing@harryfox.com
index@harryfox.com
pr@nmpa.org
I encountered a similar stupid idea a while back.
:-)
The site was a link resource site which used an applet to "decrypt" the links they had, in order to prevent link napping.
The applet wanted to perform some things not supported by the applet sandbox IE prompted me to give the applet the required privileges.
Since I'm not keen on running code from "John Doe" I wanted to see what it did and thus decompiled the applet. It took me about 15 minutes to CP (cut'n paste) the decoding code into a new app which created link pages in normal HTML without an applet.
The same was true for this particular applet. With a few modifications, there is now a "Save lyrics" button on the applet
Without saying, using an applet as the means of decrypting content which one wants to protect is not a good idea at all.
In a society that believes in nothing, fear becomes the only agenda ~ Bill Durodié
Seriously. Just search for {lyrics In A Gadda Da Vida}. It might take 15 seconds longer to find lyrics through Google. But there are so many personal lyrics pages right now that it's going to take the RIAA a while to put a sufficient dent in those sites.
That's a shame about songfile.
I however have been using SongMeanings as of late. For you Winamp users, there is also a plugin that will display the lyrics for your currently playing song.
There are some songs that I would have thought would be on there that aren't, but you can always add your own if they are missing.
The Online Guitar Archive, a collection of guitar tablature. Harry Fox is a representative of the record industry that believes sites such as these are violating the artist's copyright.
I wrote a paper on this in college. Here are the pertinent parts.
{snip)
OLGA's Dilemma
On June 9th, 1998, The Online Guitar Archive (OLGA) closed its doors. They closed because the Harry Fox Agency, a representative of music publishers, threatened litigation against OLGA on the basis that OLGA distributes copyrighted material unlawfully. According to Margaret Drum of the Harry Fox Agency: "Some sites have been closed down because they contain copyrighted material . . . the copyright owner can distribute their own [copyrighted material] - it can't be done by other people, and that's why it's considered an infringement" (Stutz). Drum has a valid point, and one that is relevant to a very important part her Agency's purpose: protecting the rights of music distributors. From such a specific (and biased) point of view as hers, the offering of a free alternative to something that many music distributors market is clearly a destructive thing. Drum and other associates at the Harry Fox Agency need to pick up a guitar and start trying to play one of their favorite songs. Commercially available guitar instructional material is mostly in the form of plain sheet music. Sheet music is extremely difficult to understand if you are a beginning musician. The inherent value to the guitar tablature OLGA offers is that it is easy to understand. And because it is easy to understand, even beginning guitarists can use it and learn how to play songs. Even for experienced guitarists, it makes the process of learning a new song easier and quicker. It is easy to see that by making the knowledge available to beginners and experienced users alike, OLGA is doing nothing to harm the music industry. It is helping it by allowing a greater number of people share in the pleasing feeling of learning and playing a song you heard on the radio. It could easily be construed that tablature is used to "teach" beginning guitarists how to play a song. Therefore, according to current copyright law the use of the material would be a "fair use."
The case of the Online Guitar Archive has made it clear that the current copyright laws are out of date and need to be revised. The dividing line between what is fair use and what isn't fair use is blurred. The answer is not to simply amend current United States Code the way the NET Act of 1997 does. The answer must lie in clearly spelling out what is and what isn't fair use of copyrighted material.
Execute? [Y/N] _
The lyrics are not encrypted. They are stored in some kind of vector graphics format, much like Windows Metafiles.
Try it: Select a song, and look at the HTML code. It will load two CAB files, one with the Java applet, the other with the lyrics. Each page is stored in a file with as extension '.rpf'. Strip out the non-ASCII characters and you're left with the lyrics.
If you want to do it the "right" way, you can disassemble the Java code, find out the file format and write a proper reader. It's quite trivial.
When I started, I was instructed to talk over the beginning of the song. The reason for this was that most people don't recognise the beginning of the song (maybe because all the DJ's talk over it?) so listeners might change the station looking for something else, and you're not really wrecking the song, because you don't have two voices competing for attention (crosstalk is very hard to understand). It also kept us from playing background music while we talked (if you notice, almost no DJ just talks without something going on the background -- supposedly it makes the patter more interesting to the ADHD listeners). We all hated the background beats, which were universally lame, so we talked over the song instead. Keep in mind, it was considered really amazing if you could consistently "nail" your patter so it stopped just as the singer starting singing. The problem with is is, sometimes you slip and talk over the beginning of the song -- which was very, very bad. I really don't think that this was some lame form of copy protection, it was just trying to keep listeners.
Which, of course, is the reason they don't tell you what song is playing. Perversely, you usually aren't allowed to "back announce" any songs on the radio. This is because you are supposed to focus on what you are going to be playing, not what you've already played. The logic is, if you talk about upcoming songs, people stick around to hear those songs, if you talk about the ones previously played, they go looking elsewhere because the song they wanted to hear was just played. You also aren't allowed to cut in in the middle of a block of music to announce songs, because people want to hear music, not you talking. On top of that, you're supposed to call attention to the lastest hit (called an 'A' or 'B' song), so you only announce it, and not the songs that follow. Using the logic above, only the first song gets announced, and you never know what's played after it. Of course, you can always call the DJ -- but they never answer the phone, because listeners who call in represent a very small minority and aren't important. As a DJ I was allowed to do whatever I wanted with callers, ignore them, abuse them, ask for nudie pictures, you name it.
Perverse logic, I know, but that's the why of it.
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