Lyric Sites In Trouble With The MPA

Joe the Lesser writes "Apparently the Music Publishers Association is cracking down on sites, like LyricFind, that display song lyrics without permission. 'Just because there is no central licensing body it doesn't make it right to take lyrics and publish them without permission.' says Sarah Faulder of the MPA."

Comments

That's really hurting the music industry.

[LemurShop]

RIAA is seriously making some good efforts in keeping everyone hating it's guts. Can anyone even speculate how lyrics sites hurt the industry? Dont bother saying "provides pirates with track titles", most official artist sites have lyricks and track listings. RIAA is slowly but surely shooting its own foot.

This is a surprise?

[dirk]

I don't know why anyone is surprised by this. Lyrics are basically poems, and no one would argue that poetry isn't covered by copyright. If I wanted to put up a page of poetry, I would have to contact the individual copyright holders and get their permission. Why is it people think music is somehow different from other forms of art and can be readily and freely stolen?

Attacking more customers...

[Paddyish]

I remember when the MPA tried to shut down the online guitar archive which is home to tons of ways to play popular music on a guitar - all interpretations, like someone showing you how they figured a song out from listening to the radio. The MPA used the lyric argument there, too. (this was in the pre-Napster time)
Then, P2P happened. All I gotta say is, you reap what you sow.

That is all.

Next up for US lawmakers

[IWantMoreSpamPlease]

After their pockets have been suitably lined for the trouble-

Without owning the CD, or the rights, you can't:

Sing it,
tell a friend,
write it down,
remember it,
listen to a friend's copy,
listen to it in someone else's car
hear someone sing it (excepting the band, provided you paid them in the first place)

am I missing anything?

This is assinine.

That's how I buy my music

[objwiz]

I use those sites to find out the who and what for song. Typically I hear something on the radio but I don't know who is signing it. All I can remember is phrase from it. So I use those phrases to search the net and find the song title and band. All the music industry is doing to me is reducing the likelihood that I will buy another album.

What the hell

[arvindn]

Everyone take a pledge and put up the lyrics of any one song in your personal web space. Suppose 100000 of these turn up overnight, what can they do about it? If they send you a C&D then take the page off; there will still be 99999 sites left.

Finding them will still be easy: if you know 2 or 3 words of a song, type those words + authorname + songtitle + the word lyrics into google and you're still going to find it just as easily.

Customer service? What for? That's the enemy.

[yroJJory]

It's no hoax. As someone else pointed out, this has happened before. lyrics.ch was fantastic but it got killed by this kind of action.

They required that the lyrics not be presented in text, so they had to devise a method that presented the lyrics in some kind of applet so end users couldn't grab 'em all wholesale.

The end result: if you didn't user Windows you couldn't use the site.

I stopped visiting, which, of course, was the point of their actions.

You call this entertainment??

[William.Bertram]

Is anyone else just flat sick and tired of the "entertainment industry"? Isn't the purpose of "entertainment" to make life more enjoyable? Does anyone find being sued for ridiculous amounts of money entertaining?

We should refer to these people as the "litigation" industry to be more accurate. I hereby vow never to be entertained by the litigation industry again.

Yes, I realize that nobody likes the litigation industry, but I'm just sick of it, and needed a vent. If I ran across an "entertainment industry" scumbag dying in an alley, I would only stop to kick their teeth in.

bitching about lyrics?

[dmnic]

Last time I checked, publishers and record labels didnt SELL lyrics. (note: lyrics != song)
So whats the beef? Posting lyrics isnt stealing anything unlike posting mp3 tracks taken from the latest album.

I work for a band(s)

Re:Lyrics

[mblase]

I mean isn't this fair use?

It's only fair use if you're citing part of the lyric for a paper or an article. Copying the whole thing, for the sole purpose of having a copy of the whole thing, is simple infringement. Poetry is protected the same way, and you'll find that there are in fact several popular poets (or their estates) who aggressively protect their work from online reproduction.

Music is heard, but the words are still copy and are fairly copyrighted.

No, I'm Not

[waldoj]

What's your goal here? To continue to run your Website? To not need to kneel down and kiss the MPA's boots? To make a stand and defend a sane interpretation of copyright law? All of them are admirable goals. In your shoes, I'd probably have the same ones.

How are you going about achieving your goal? By tweaking lawyers. By tweaking lawyers who have already implicitly threatened serious legal action. By tweaking lawyers who work for a massive and well-funded organization who have already implicitly threatened serious legal action.

FOR FUCK'S SAKE, WHAT DID YOU THINK YOU WERE DOING?

I know what I'm doing. :) I've been involved in two high-profile ACLU-backed free speech cases (Schleiffer v. City of Charlottesville, Microsystems v. Scandanavia Online ), once as a plaintiff, once as a defendant, and I've certainly learned a great deal about freedom of speech. More relevantly, I've known Dave Matthews Band and their management for years, and they have no problem with anything on my website, tablature or otherwise.

While knowledge about point the first is amusing, point the second is the ace up my sleeve. :)

-Waldo Jaquith