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Songfile (lyrics.ch) Trails Off

Posted by timothy on from the day-the-music-died dept.

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.

3 of 220 comments (clear)

  1. Alas, it's not possible... by TDScott · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Since the first copyright dispute, they've used a Java applet that doesn't allow cutting and pasting, or paging through...

    It can't be copied unless you somehow intercepted the packets - and even then, that's a lot of work when some other website will probably have printed the lyrics anyway.

    So long, lyrics.ch. We hardly knew ya.

  2. Not a huge loss - they were gone anyway. by WWWWolf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Basic order of the events was this:

    1. They had a nice lyrics website with every lyric for just about every somewhat well-known song.
    2. Someone in the Industry didn't like it.
    3. The Industry asked them to remove some songs.
    4. Site maintainers couldn't.
    5. After largish mess, the site reopened in a vastly less useful form - most of the lyrics (that weren't "copyright checked") were unavailable, and the remainder of the lyrics were displayed using Java applet that didn't allow printing or stuff. Lyrics themselves were encrypted.
    6. Since it couldn't really be used, it stopped being an useful resource...

    Some time later, they proposed doing the same thing to Napster. "Make them stop distributing our copyrighted works for free and make them use a format that no one will use when there's other (admittedly less 'easy' but at least non-crippled) alternatives available."

    However, unlike Napster, lyrics.ch was an "ethical" service, even when it bordered on the dark edge of the international copyright law.

    I really don't see what problem the song copyright holders have with distributing lyrics and guitar tabs - Especially when they're not selling that information themselves. (I would be really happy if all CDs would come with lyrics... or, alternatively, the musicians would learn to pronounce the words clearly enough so we dumb foreigners could make any sense of them =)

  3. It's not the International Lyrics Server anyways. by Tackhead · · Score: 5, Interesting
    > going to my good old standby, lyrics.ch (and summarily suffering through the redirection to songfile),

    Then you were never looking at the International Lyrics Server. You were looking at the thing that killed the International Lyrics Server.

    Did anybody ever mirror the original ILS before the enemy destroyed it? Does anybody have backup tapes/CD-Rs?

    Since the shutdown (and make no mistake, songfile.com was never useful as anything other than a way to find out that yes, Harry Fox owned the words, and wanted you to know they owned the words, and didn't want you to read them - or that they didn't own the words and therefore you couldn't read them) seems that bandwidth has gotten accessible enough that such a thing, if it exists, could be discreetly distributed via one of the many P2P applications, or posted to USENET via an open SOCKS proxy. Diskspace has also gotten cheap enough that individuals could host their own local copies of the pre-Foxsized ILS on their own hard drives.

    Not that I'd encourage anyone to do such a thing. But it'd be kinda nice to see if someone were to independently come up with the idea of doing it.