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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.
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.
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 =)
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.
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.
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
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] _
No, a large amount of people have *stopped* buying music since Napster fell apart, and music sharing splintered into 15 million rival protocols.
The time when I bought most albums was when I had a nice broadband connection and Napster was in its heyday -- in conjunction with cdnow.com it let me listen to lots of artists which I'd not heard about before. Now I buy much less music, and from a narrower base of artists.
The year that the music industry was declaring that file sharing would destroy music buying, revenues from CD sales went *up*.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
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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