Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
I checked with whois, and the Harry Fox Agency owns the
domain. They didn't take ownership of it recently because
whois says that the record was last updated on 5/23/01. Maybe
this is nothing new for everyone else, but I didn't realise
it until now.
You have a right to dwell in the past, but please do not inflict this insanity on others.
It's not Tuesday morning anymore. It's not Tuesday afternoon anymore. Thank God its not Thursday because I could never get the hang of Thursdays.
steve
--- rapper/producer/bachelorette party stripper
Before someone else asks this, can we have lyrics GPL'ed ?
lyrics.ch was a great tool. I'm a poet (of sorts) and a musical artist. Not giving my audience access to my material doesn't make sense. Artists produce art to be enjoyed by others and to get themselves off.
By making the art harder to obtain keeps the audience from enjoying the art. It doesn't make sense. It's too ironic. It's not like the artist is going to be making much money selling song books and lyric books.
I know of one artist group that publishes their lyrics via the web, www.beastieboys.com. Let us support and rejoice in the Beastie Boys.
funk
--- rapper/producer/bachelorette party stripper
Just type "band name" "song name".
Somebody always has it.
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 =)
... seems harryfox.com is being slashdotted. May I suggest easing up a bit for a short period of time or trying a google cache
--- Ãther SPOON!
There are quite a few places which have stopped keeping lyrics online... for eg: lovetest.com. Go go google, search for lyrics band name song title and lo... there you go..
Shouldn't be much of a problem getting the lyrics. someone somewhere will have it, and if not, the google cache will surely have it.
--
Does google cache it's cache ?
Such a site is worth it's weight in gold. Or it's amount of bytes in dollars... or whatever.
:)
In any case, I had no idea about this place until now, when they are shutting it down.
Typical.
...is Giga's Dutch Lyrics archive.
He had an archive of 18000 dutch lyrics. He ran this free archive for about five years and was forced to take it down by the Musicopy foundation.
Good intentions are not always appriciated...
http://www.giga.nl/walter/gnsa/ (dutch only)
bash$
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.
I know your msg is now marked flamebait, but I want to comment anyway.
6000+ people dying in any way whatsoever is a human "tragedy". As another post said, more people died yesterday in equally morbid ways. What's special about the American saga is that the American people believed without a doubt that their safety and cherished freedom was untouchable.
During East Timor's crisis, my country, Australia, sent thousands of peace keepers into the trouble areas. We evacuated hundreds, if not thousands of refugees from East Timor, and returned those who wanted to go back safe and sound after the conflict ended. The statistic (and I hate to use that word) that was ignored most was this: over 20,000 people were killed before we lifted an administrative finger to help.
Those figures are ignored because East Timor and the region isn't considered a "civilised" region if the Westernised sense. East Timer took maybe 15 minutes of TV news a day here. America took over 4 days, non-stop. Why is this?
America, the free country, whose populace is on the whole ignorant to other country's racial wars, just had it's foot trod on, and now expects every other country to pay complete and utter attention while it rants about destroying economies and further un-balancing the world's trade weight.
Now, I'm no bigot on either side here. Australia plays just a small part of the global game, but it's culture is very close to America's. I won't pretend that I'm not a heavy-handed consumer, and sure I enjoy the freedom a "democracy" provides. However, the world is more than the US.
Next time Timor erupts, or something else just as horrific surfaces and gets a whopping 5 minutes of airtime just before the new series of Friends or reruns of Buffy, maybe paying a little more attention to what your country had to do with it, both to help and to provoke. Iran & Iraq came about because of meddling. Hussein was funded by the States. Osama was funded by the States.
Maybe not double-dipping in every global situation would keep America safe? Democracy, freedom, and all those other buzzwords come to be because somewhere, someone paid a price in the beginning. Call it tall poppy syndrome, but if America wants to be as loud and arrogant in its' world view, it should also realise that others will want to take it down.
This was coming... Tuesday was just the day it arrived. 6000+ died not because they deserved to, but because of Governmental arrogance that one was right and all else is wrong... and both sides contributed to this.
The `/. trolls would come out to tell him that it wasn't a real troll, since it didn't scream 'First Post'... -alexjohns
They took away our everything.... damn them, let them suffer
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...
It was killed because the big companies had already realised (pre-Napster) that in order to continue spewing the silliness they tried to allege in courts, they had to control every aspect of the music they published and take every case of "infringement" seriously. US law requires this to some extent, but Sony, Warner and Bertelsmann are willing to go that extra mile.
The spread of lyrics for any song -- even from this week's latest gyrating girl or cool neat-o boy group -- enhances sales. However, in order to control the copyrights, the publishers will not even license rights to reproduce these lyrics. Instead, you must go to the band's official site (usually within the record company's domain), where you can not only see the lyrics (if you provide enough personal information), but you also have the "opportunity" to buy lots more merchandise. You are a "consumer".
So forget something sensible, like the centralised, optimised and simplified lyrics.ch database. Give up on ideas that make life a little easier for "consumers" but might deny a copyright holder a possible extra $0.00013 from a banner impression.
Of course, you can always search Google for "<band name> AND <song title> AND (lyrics OR text OR words)" and find the lyrics elsewhere. Works for finding guitar tabs, too. But the centralised database which was organised to provide you with the information you wanted -- how you wanted it -- instead of advertising and enticement to further purchase is history.
I already mourned the loss of this site almost four years ago. What HFA did to it once they got control made it unusable. I haven't been there since.
woof.
If I had a penny for every Goth girl Web page with Cure lyrics, I'd have $89,317.74
So the corporations want to make money from you and you don't want them to.
So stop buying their stuff.
Stop buying CDs. Make your own music. See live music. Stop buying DVDs. Stop seeing blockbusters. Go to the theatre. Support your local independent filmmakers.
That will hurt the big guns and support those who really need it. Who cares if you don't get to see or hear the latest stuff: it's mostly rubbish, you certainly won't suffer for the lack of it, and hell, you might even learn something new.
As the passing of Lyrics.ch brings a deepening sense of calm to the musical landscape,
a single voice cries "Where're The Fscking Mirrors???"
This post encoded with ROT26. If you can read it, you've violated the DMCA. Handcuffs please, sergeant.
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.
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
This is the same deal as (g)napster. I absolutely hate listening to the radio, so the Internet is the only way for me to listen to something before I buy it. The music industry is making this more difficult, therefore, I buy less music.
When lyrics were more easily available and MP3s were more easy to get a hold of, I bought more music.
It never ceases to amaze me how hostile this industry is to it's best customers...
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
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.
Just another example of how our lives are being run by lawyers.
But we are to blame the most for we elect to office these lawyers.
Maybe someone out there could write a Napster like program except for searching for lyrics or a server like the CDDB. I know there has been talk of adding lyrics to the CDDB (Compact Disk database).
Wise men speak because they have something to say, Fools because they have to say something!!!!
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] _
Albeit incomplete, but aren't they all...
God bless transcribers.
http://www.sing365.com/index.html
Acquiescence leads to obliteration
The HarryFox Agency tried to do the same thing to the Online Guitar Archive (OLGA) a couple of years ago. Kinda like lyrics.ch, the OLGA is comprised of ear transcriptions of songs for the guitar. Can't they just let it alone.
include a "+" sign before the word "and" to make "+and one" and google will force the include of the word "and".
all that totally for free crap goes out the window when your living in a shitty apartment and your rent's overdue. And your only source of income is a band that probably won't make it big. That's when you realize, HEY i wanna entertain people but I wanna eat too.
Photos.
Science is just a bunch of beliefs, as all religions are...
They both contain beliefs, but religions are based on faith, while science is based on observation. Very big difference.
+1 Insightful, -1 Troll. What can I say, I'm an Insightful Troll.
I tried to work a licensing deal with lyrics.ch a few months ago. That's when I found out about Harry Fox Agency's involvement. HFA listened politely to our proposal, and then let us know they were going to hold off on licensing lyrics for a while. I got the sense that they're working on trying to monetize that resource themselves. I wouldn't be surprised if we see that as a bargaining chip in MusicNet or Pressplay negotiations, and perhaps one of those services will offer access to lyrics with your subscription. Joy...
nonsig. unsig. desig.
A question for the audience: are DJ's around the world as bad are they are here (Wichita, KS)? Specifically, these morons seem to think we tune in to hear their lips flap - they talk over the intro to the song, right up to (and often past) the point where the lyrics start, and then start yapping at the end of the song.
Is this just stupidity, vanity, or some vague and low-tech form of copy protection? Any DJ's out there that can answer?
It is so bad here that I no longer listen to the radio for any length of time (just in the mornings, for about 2 songs, on my clock radio. That way, the annoyance factor of the DJ's helps me wake up). I listen entirely to my own music collection the rest of the time.
These idiots seem to forget that if we aren't listening, we aren't pumping up their ad revenues. Of course, this also makes it hard to hear new music.
www.eFax.com are spammers
OLGA (online guitar archive) Has a huge listing of lyrics and tableture ( if you play guita/bass). I've been using that site since hmmm... 1995. All the song files are in ascii so console folks can dig it too.
These talentless yahoos who run the recording industry know that technology will soon put them out of a job. The only reason for a record industry to exist is that you needed a lot of capital to press a n old fashoned vinel album. Now, with only a few thousand dollars, anyone can record and burn a CD as good in quality as one made by the recording industry ( of course, you need to have technical and musical talent :)
The only musicians who support the recording industry are those who've gotten really rich or hope to do so. But, like any gold rush, the rock and roll gold rush is over. Too many people now know how to play an electric guitar. Musicians can still be successful, but the days of instant riches for the lucky few are coming to a close.
That is how it should be. Talented, hard working people will always be able to make a living. The musicians who figure out how to make money w/o the record companies will be fruitful and happy.
The record industry is in a mad rush to frighten people out of their fair-use rights, using legal terrorism.
Yes, but for doing that, if you live in the states, they can throw you in prison for circumventing a copyright control device.
Neat, huh?
Is he related to Mr. Clete, secretary of the Musicians' Guild?
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
If music companies had some real interest in online distribution maybe they could try and release a more feature laden product to compete with somebody's plain vanilla cd rip- a music format could be extended so to include the lyrics within the song file(or has this been done already?), and to really go that extra mile the text could be synced to the music, for karaoke or follow-the-bouncing-ball.
Just for the record, you do realize that you're now a felon under the DMCA, right? Not to say anything about the ethics of the situation, but The Man could throw you in the stripey hole for years, should this come to their attention.
Pretty absurd, huh? Write your congresscritters. Contribute to EFF. Fight to reverse the DMCA, before you end up fighting for reduced bail.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
I had a .tgz that i wget'd off a T1 once, it took a few hours cause of the hundreds of thousands of files. Unfortunately, I deleted that a long long time ago, needed some space.
The DJ's on the station I listen to actually say the song name and artist either before or after the track and then dont talk/cut out the song until it's faded away! I'm amazed at that. It means a few seconds less time of listening to themselves talk. Of course it's a station that students mainly listen to so they probably bitched which made the station adopt that practice.
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.
Or even better, put them in some sort of de-centralized system (freenet? gnutella?) that isn't susceptable as someone like napster and the like.
Sadly, I didn't mirror anything from the original server, though it got me a lot of the information I needed at the time...
There will never be a web site that carries "every lyric ever made".The best place to look for lyrics would have to be using google (in the above method)to look in fan sites.Fan sites are much more devoted to there artists,which means that you usually won't get misprinted lyrics or some songs lacking. You can find a fan site for almost every popular and no so popular artist that ever existed(If there were good enough that you would want to search for their lyrics)and one of the main features of this sites are is the lyrics section.Today when we have an excellent search engine like google,i don't think that we should mourn lyrics.ch too much.
Another lyrics site that works great is this one that is hosted at Astralabs.
There's always The Archive of Misheard Lyrics. Not a reliable research source, but it sure is hilarious...
Maybe I could license the song, but none of the license categories seem to apply (no, I don't want to make 500 recordings of it minimum) Another annoying thing is movie soundtracks. Anyone ever try finding the score for the theme to Enemy of the State or Twister? Sheesh! I'm starting to think Harry Fox should be shot (but nah.. that wouldn't do anything - there's always another lawyer-money-grubber in line.)
Harry Fox is the licensing division of the NMPA and other publishers. They recently won a landmark case against Universal Music for copyright right infringment, as the music they offered on FarmClub was licensed only to be recorded, not webcast or for download. The damages have yet to be determined. There are usually at least two sets of copyrights invovled if not more. One for the composition (the songwriter), and one for the sound recording (what you hear). The publishers/songwriters own the copyrights on the composition and the labels own the copyrights on the sound recording. In the past the NMPA has waited till the RIAA has filed a lawsuit, then piled on with what I call "Me Too" lawsuits. However with the recent win against Universal I expect that NMPA and Harry Fox are going to be taking a much more pro-active role, as the labels launch MusicNet and Pressplay. The RIAA and NMPA, while often on the same side of the fence, are also often at each others throats as they fight over royalty issues.
I first stumbled across lyrics.ch almost four years ago when I was taking a voice class (scoff now, and you may not kiss my ring later), and since then, I've found that that was the only place to find lyrics to many, many songs. Damn greedheads, anyhow.
One thing I wonder about: many of the songs at lyrics.ch are public domain - songs which have been around long enough that there is no copyright on them anymore. Does any intrepid soul have the wherewithal to mirror just those songs? Or will LarryWhoever do it as a public service?
political_news.c: warning: comparison is always true due to limited range of data type
Not true. I am a firm believer in science, and a non-believer in (other?) religion. However, science is firmly based on one belief that has no proof, and cannot be proven through scientific means, and that is that things are reproducible. "If a match and lighter fluid create flame one day, they will create it the next." How do we know this is true? Because it's happened before. Science "based on observation" is also based on the faith that things that happened yesterday will work tomorrow.
Last post!
In Europe, we have a thing called RDS - Radio Data system - I don't know if you have it in the states. RDS carries a thing called RT (radio text).
Virtually all radio stations support it. You press a button on the receiver and it tells you what song is playing, the weather, usually a url of the station.All new receivers basically support it as well.
Another thing you can do is just write down the time and date and then check the playlist on the website or send the radio station an e-mail. I have done that several times before I had an RT-capable radio or am in the car where only RDS is supported (automatic frequency switching, radio station name display) but not radio text as to not distract the driver).
The last time I went there it had an annoying popunder advert, but it's a good resource nonetheless.
--
In need of some dARK Therapy?
Just for the record, you do realize that you're now a felon under the DMCA, right?
Just for the record, you're wrong.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
RDS is used by a very small number of stations in North America. This is largely because there are so few radios that support it here. I know of only one person who has an RDS radio and only one station that uses RDS. I live in Canada, and my local CBC affiliate uses RDS to display their call letters continuously (nothing else) on their station. No other station on my FM dial uses it. (By the way, RDS only works on FM.)
It's really stupid. I walk into a stereo shop and ask the salesman if he has any new receivers with fancy new features. RDS? No. L-Band digital radio? American "IBOC" digital? No. They have these receivers with slick LED displays and chrome finishes with 1970s radio technology inside.
Back in the '60s and '70s, the governmental radio authorities would mandate things like, "All radios above a certain price must have FM stereo reception," etc. to promote the growth of FM, or "All TVs must have high-quality UHF tuners," to ensure UHF TV stations would not suffer. Now, they don't do shit. AM stereo radio died as a result of their idleness, and RDS will die, too.
Remember back in the '80s when your local top-40 station ID'd themselves as "KXYZ 800 AM stereo"? They weren't jerking you around; they really were stereo. But because the government never demanded radio manufacturers include AM stereo on their radios and took 10 years to decide on a standard, the AM band is rapidly becoming a ghost town. Everyone wants an FM station instead, and in many major radio markets, the FM band is completely full.
I don't see why the RIAA isn't pushing for deployment and proper use of RDS for displaying artist and title information. In the late '80s, they would slap stickers that said "When you play it, say it," on records sent to radio stations, to promote artist recognition.
The next thing to die: digital radio. Canada wants to use the L-Band (1452 to 1492 MHz) for digital radio (same as in Europe), the United States wants to use a system called In-Band-On-Channel digital, in which the digital and analogue signal will share the same frequency. Neither of these will become standard in North America.
Without government intervention, only a technology that makes a huge, radical difference (like colour vs. black-and-white TV) can ever become commonly used.
I guess this means you don't care about intellectual property. It's the same old attitude of entitlement, "its on the net, so it must always be free". Although after saying that, I feel copyright laws should only last for a reasonable time of say less than 20 years. That is more than sufficient for the authors to be renumerated while letting the work flow into the public domain as copyright originally was intended to do.
this is not a sig
How so? He described creating a circumvention device to overcome security protecting copyrighted intellectual property from unpermitted use. Creation of such circumvention devices is expressly illegalized by the DMCA. So on what basis are you claiming otherwise?
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
Hi,
I'd like to express my deepest regrets that your business has not been successfully able to keep up with the times.
I'd, further like to define the term "fair use" for you, but instead, I think it would be more useful to define another, more appropriate term; "public good."
Eric S. Raymond once made a very good observation; information is not like spaghetti. If I make a pot of spaghetti, and I give you half of my spaghetti, I am left with 50% less than what I originally cooked. I will have to put forth an amount of effort to make more spaghetti in order to return my inventory to the original amount.
On the other hand; If I have a piece of information, and I tell you what it is, now you too have the same piece of information, in the same amount as I do, and I have not diminished in the amount I began with. In fact, if I gave this same piece of information to hundreds of millions of people; why, I'm -still- in possession of the original amount.
Much like digital media in it's native environment, the Internet.
Enter the Internet and the advent of, what I like to call, Global Public Opinion (GPO). As the Governer of Minnesota Jesse "the body" Ventura, has made quite obvious, the Internet can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Get the GPO out of your favor, and all the laws, lawyers, and systems in the world won't help you maintain your business practices or your customers.
As people are freely, and without regard to borders, communicating with one another, they are learning about the world, and life in places they've never been.. What a lot of the online world is learning is that, when groups of people come together and speak with each other, they can, as a body, make a difference in the various systems they live in. It's important to understand this isn't [necessarily] a conscious or deliberate effort on the parties conversing as much as it is a natural effect of mass digital communication. That which you [the reader] and I are doing now.
Bodies of politic tend to sway lifestyles and business models more than marketing budgets, advertising, or law suits. As the average consumer's (we like to call ourselves citizens) intelligence increases, through everyday digital interaction, people will cluster into interest groups.
As some clouds of knowledgable individuals interact, they will find some countries' existing laws resembling a more tangible "industrial" era, out of date; not relevant and beginning to be misused by certain corporate entities for their own benefit.
God help those corporations who turn their customers afoul of their goods and wares. God help those governing bodies who cannot re-visit their systems without the the principles of freedom as their guide, instead of the principles of profit. Tyranny and oppression don't go over too well in America.
All of this begs the question; what about all the poor artists, whose hard work would go un-rewarded without the likes of your clients?
Does access to a direct, unrestricted, world-wide distribution channel for their work honestly detriment them somehow? Isn't part of the point of being an artist to reach as much of an audience as you can with your message?
Nonetheless, the fate of lyrics.ch is an atrocity. Now it's even harder to find new artists, for us the consumer. What do you care? My bet is that you don't, really. You have a Party Line(tm) that expresses "this or that in the 'greater interest' of such and such." Perhaps, not so deep down, you yourself believe that it's mostly BS, too.
Well, you are slowly turning the GPO against you. As you do so, you will find your circles slowly shrinking. Even if, individually, you've invested well and are financially set for life; I do not envy the stigma you are cultivating, as it will follow you well into your retirement.
You and your clients have lost my business, and will steadily lose the business, and confidence, of a significant amount of consumers over acts like this, the DMCA, SSSCA, UCITA, and others. This legislation villifies you and your clients. The world does not resemble what I elucidate in this letter, however, these issues are on the table for all to consider.
Given this unprecedented global medium for communication [the Internet] is publicly and privately developed, supported, and here to stay; how is it honestly expected that the Internet can be legally regulated by what amounts to censorship? It is a proverb among Internet engineers that "The Internet routes around damage". The more attempt to "legally" manipulate the content of the Internet, the more reaction there will be from the Internet, like a living organism, in the interest of its own "health".
Congratulations if you have read this far. I realize my words mean little to you. I am content to have sent you this assessment of your situation, and am interested in your reply only to the extent that I know what it will be. It is obvious to me, and to the world, what your opinion is by simply observing the fate of lyrics.ch. You, the RIAA, and the MPAA are on a steady course to being seen in the same light as the terrorists which brought down the World Trade Center in New York City.
If you feel this will not affect you individually, let the forums keep discussing... Let the artists continue to hear from their fans, and talk amongst each other... What I say in this letter will come to pass if you, your clients, and copyright legislation do not catch up with reality. I for one, will not miss you.
--
EOF
M*** P.
Unix Administrator at large.
A************* - x1879
-
If a nation values anything more than freedom, it will lose its freedom;
and the irony of it is that if it is comfort or money it values more, it
will lose that, too.
-- W. Somerset Maugham
US$0.02++
Given that ``he'' appears to have a head with rocks in it rather than music with rocks in it, I'd say he was closer to Chrysoprase the loan-shark troll. (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Fuck that! Hit them with vigor. You're just reading their site, of course.
sulli
RTFJ.
I used to drive about thirty minutes to/from work, during which time I would listen to the radio. Because djs wouldn't announce what songs they were playing, I would find three or four songs that I liked, and use lyrics.ch to look up the songs, buying the CDs from amazon or another online vendor.
After lyrics.ch went away the first time, returning with the crappy, incomplete, emasculated version that you couldn't add lyrics to, I stopped buying the stuff I couldn't find. My CD purchasing went from about 200 CDs one year, to about 15 the next.
I can't imagine I'm a rare case. I believe killing lyrics.ch has cost the recording industry at least a few tens of thousands of dollars, which, while statistically insignificant, seems somehow poetic.
FTSORIAA.
Quote of the day: ``Kill all of the lawyers! Let Satan sort them out!'' Where's a flaming arrow when you really need one? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Describing such a device is not a felony. Even if that description could be considered trafficking (which I doubt it could), it was not done "willfully and for purposes of commercial advantage or private financial gain".
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?
There are copies of the lyrics.ch database (or, at least, the file set that was used to create it) floating around - I myself have a copy.
There are also many databases that have equaled or surpassed the quality and quantity of lyrics.ch's. Some (such as ours) are also under legal pressure, and others (such as Sing365, or Astraweb) haven't yet grown to the point of being legally hounded.
In the long term (or the short term, if I have my way), there will be a legal, licensed alternative for lyric searching - and it'll be integrated into your favourite P2P program, your music player, and more.
But it takes time. And a helluva lot of patience.
Darryl
----------
Darryl Ballantyne
http://www.darrylballantyne.com
To be finicky about it, yes, his post was not a felony -- but that's not what I originally said in any case. He described the commission of a felony. That is, if he actually built a circumvention applet as he claimed, then in so doing he committed a felony. "Commercial advantage" is pretty broad, and can include something as simple as *enabling* the use of copyrighted material without permission, even if you personally do not make commercial use of that material. Just ask Dmitri Skylarov.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
-E
Send mail here if you want to reach me.
I just became a DJ at my local college station, KWTR (Whittier College - Whittier, CA). They basically told me to play whatever the hell I wanted to, however I wanted to, just as long as cussing was covered up (or, if it's cussing that isn't really audible, just don't get caught). The only thing they told us to avoid was dead air. So I personally announce every song I play, because the goal of my show is to educate people on bands (popularity is irrelevant - it could be at the top of the charts or never heard by someone at any record label). And here's the unavoidable plug: Mondays, Thursdays 8-9PM PST; www.kwtr.com. 530 AM. yay.
w.r.t. the pile of CDs in the car, do what I did and buy an MP3 player, like this.
It's a whole lot better than a pile of CDs in the trunk...
www.eFax.com are spammers
"Commercial advantage" is pretty broad, and can include something as simple as *enabling* the use of copyrighted material without permission, even if you personally do not make commercial use of that material. Just ask Dmitri Skylarov.
I think you'd have a pretty tough time convincing a jury of that. I'm certainly not convinced. Another point to be made is that the DMCA is not enforcible as interstate commerce when there is no commerce taking place. The government would then have to rely on the copyright clause, and fair use would almost certainly kick in.
What Sklyarov (!) allegedly did was not even remotely similar. He was allegedly engaging in international commerce for profit. That is a much different situation, from a constitutional standpoint, from a legal (DMCA) standpoint, and from a standpoint of juror sympathy.
ok then your [sic] infringing on my copyright! Could you as [sic] me next time before STEALING my comments for your own?