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Music Should Be Heard But Not Understood
PaxTech writes "Warner/Chapell music has cease-and-desisted a small freeware developer who wrote a Mac OS X lyrics downoading application. pearLyrics in no way contributed to piracy or copyright infringement, it was merely a tool to search for lyrics on public websites and view or add them to mp3 metadata. This is part of a larger crackdown on websites distributing lyrics. Apparently, the labels would like to force us back to a world where Hendrix kisses guys."
Okay, I can kind of see the basis behind SOME of the recording industry's points (go ahead and mod me flamebait now) seeing as music is copyrighted property and whatnot. But aren't lyrics not copyrighted or are the hundreds of sites out there that give song lyrics away for free underground criminal enterprises?
In any case I think the recording industry is definately overstepping its bounds here and should probably focus on winning the first losing battle it got it self into (the fight vs. p2p file sharing) before trying to start another one.
$ man sig
bash: No manual entry found for sig.
So what's new? Companies send Cease and desist orders all the time, it's the easiest way to scare people into doing what they want. It's ridiclous but it's true, if you act like you're going to sue people they figure out if they can aford the law suit (win or lose) and more often than not they see they don't have the money so they're forced to stop.
It's like pointing a gun at someone, they "could" not get shot, but is it worth the risk when you could just give them your watch and be done with it?
I like muppets.
Maybe my comprehension of spoken(sung?) language sucks but I prefer having the lyrics, it really helps me understand what an artist is trying to communicate, and among other things it makes it a lot easier to read the subtext involved. This is especially helpful in the case of a "rock opera" type "concept" album (one example is Green Day's "American Idiot", another from another area is VNV Nation's "Matter+Form")
I can't wait to have to pay to understand the words to a song.
...shutting down recent lyrics sites, that is. After the big fuss made over lyrics.ch, I was surprised to be able to consistently find the lyrics to songs I've heard on the radio by simply searching Google. Many times, the places I'd find lyrics hosted lyrics for thousands of songs. What took them so long in shutting down these massive sites?
I don't really understand it. Unlike mp3s, I can't see lyrics downloads doing anything but boosting sales. Nevertheless, posting lyrics violates copyright and it is within their rights to try to get these places shut down.
But first you have to buy the CD - what I've used lyrics sites for most often is "hey, that song on the radio was pretty good - wonder who the artist is?" Most of my recent iTunes purchases came after doing something like that - and on occasion I've even bought the entire CD.
yeah lets make it harder for cover bands to cover songs let alone regular people from understanding the message. Yhat way we can just string random words together with a crappy 4/4 beat and a repetative melody and mass sell crap you our consumers coz they will buy anything if we advertise it 24/7....see Brittany spears
yet another way to control and destroy culture....folk music was the evolvement of other tunes and melodies with new words....you cant sample, you cant get lyrics, you cant record music off the radio you cant share music, you cant do anything really without fear of "the man" which of course is what making music is all about...fear, conflict & free expression all the things that the music distributers want to stop.... it may get to the stage where you cant actually be allowed to sing along with the tunes for fear of retribution....
music is there to be enjoyed not billed for LEARN YOUR FUCKING INDUSTRY
Copyright is, at its most basic, the monopoly to use force to control a non-physical "thing." Before copyright racketeering, we had ten thousand years of art, music and creation. Today marketable art is more and more in the hands of those who can not produce. Where 7 years of legal force might be ok, no law offering power ever stays reasonable.
The web is ending our need to copyright, as enforcing it will soon be impossible. BitTorrent is getting replaced with third party proxies so information stores can;t be traced. Small bands that give away their music are seeing increased sales of show tickets and merchandise. Old Brick and mortar retailers can't compete with eBay and Amazon, and the used market always offers the same art for less.
Here's the basis for the end of copyright: the free market. The laws of supply and demand say anything for sale with an unlimited supply is worthless. Art is worthless -- the profit comes from how you package it (live versus CD) and what you offer as a value added incentive.
The ruined feeling is probably because 9 times out of 10 the lyrics suck more ass than a donkey vacuum.
"Anything too stupid to be said is sung."
-Voltaire
Do you get a copy of the lyrics when you buy off iTunes? I don't know the answer to that one, but I'd say it's probably "no." I once used EvilLyrics to assist in decoding those crazy System of a Down songs, and found it VERY useful. If they really follow through with this, they'll have to shut down the hundreds of lyrics sites on the web. Like the guy said, it's just a specialised browser with lots of cache...
Consciousness is a myth. Trust me.
Every lyrics site I find is loaded full of ads, and I think they all steal from each other. Why isn't there a wikilyrics site?
Thanks for shopping RIAA.
You're assuming that their priority is to get the most sales.
Their priority is to persuade everyone that there is no way to have one's songs sold without using the labels' service.
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Bah humbug. It's not copyright infringement, it's fair use. The lyrics are a small part excerpted from the work (which is both the lyrics and the music), and this app is non-profit and designed for reference.
- Sig files: contemptibly familiar the second time around.
What happened here is that someone found out that some people will continue to buy CDs if that were the only way to get lyrics. But the cost of this effort is so much greater than any gains they'll see. It's not like that is one piece of the puzzle to stopping large scale piracy. It's not even comparable to chipping away at it.
Their only hope is to come clean on pricing, availability, and a wide variety of interoperability features that consumers want. The longer they wait, the harder it's going to be. And meanwhile there are always artists with expiring contracts waiting to be swooped up by better labels, or self-publishing.
The only thing these labels actually own are:
- CD manufacturing and distribution: This is an antiquated technology that is well on its way out.
- A Stranglehold arrangement for concert venues: Well known bands can work around this. New bands might soon plan to sign 1 contract with an RIAA label, and then go it alone (roughly like Harvey Danger).
They no longer control marketing, or any of the new distribution options. Granted these "new distribution options" are all basically free downloads or illegal networks, but that's what they have to compete with. They could spend another ten years fighting those in court and be no better off. At some point someone will put together a better fee system, and begin to attract enough new and big name artists with expired contracts, and provide all of the features. If the labels want to survive, they had better be the ones to do it first. They still haven't even admitted they're to blame.
It is 3Q 2030.
You're arguing with your wife again. It seems she's missed her spending quota again this quarter. A proud patriot, you have no problem spending 85% and sometimes 90% of your income on consumer goods, yet she can't manage to spend even close to the 75% required by law. It's that foreign mentality, you suppose--that's what happens when you are educated overseas and without the benefit of a corporate sponsor. You have to remind her that if the Internal Consumer's Service (ICS) catches her, she'll be doing time in Philip Morris(TM) Prison like her uncle.
Oh well, hopefully a night at the town's AOL-Time-Warner-Clear-Channel-Blockbuster(TM) Authorized Media Distribution Center will smooth things over with her. That reminds you--you need to have your eye- and ear-implants inspected for this quarter again, otherwise you won't even be allowed in tonight.
You haven't attended church services for a while. Although your wife is a devout follower of God's Customers(TM) and shops in the Church Store at LEAST five tiems a quarter, you're not yet convinced that converting from Consumers For Jesus(TM) was that sound an investment.
Your son Rick has just graduated from the local McDonalds(TM) High School. You want him to go to Pepsi(TM) University like his sister, but he wants to go to Coke(TM) College. Not that it matters--the permits you get at either school are the same. Although he really wanted to attend Stanford(TM), his corporate sponsors rejected that proposal, based on what it might do to his credit rating.
Your youngest daughter just graduated Pepsi(TM) U. It was expensive, but she is all set now, having received a Creative Thought Permit and a Entrepreneurship License. On top of that she's accepted a job at Fortune 10 corporation. Of course almost everyone works for a Fortune 10 nowadays, there being only thirty-some corporations left. It's too bad she had to sign all those NDA's though--you'd really like to be allowed to know where she would be living and how to get in touch with her. Ahh well, it's the price you pay for our corporate security.
Your older daughter, after twenty quarters of employment, was finally permitted to tell you that she is working in middle-management at AT&T. Of course, every job in the United Corporations of America is middle-management. The cheaper--skilled--labor is all outsourced to Those Other Countries, whatever they are called. In ten more quarters, assuming her credit rating remains good and she has attained Shareholder status, she'll be allowed to talk face-to-face (no encrypted channel) with us again!
Apparently, her five year old daughter has been grounded again, this time for racking up a $6000 fine--singing "Happy Birthday(TM)" at a party without a Media Distribution License. She really needs to be taught a lesson--that as a patriotic Consumer of the UCA, she needs to respect the rights of Shareholders and property owners. What a dangerous thoughts she has! She thinks she should be allowed to say whatever she pleases, no matter what it does to someone else's portfolio! No one can get it through to her that terrorist ideas like that will land her in one of those "special" schools--and she'd be subjected to a lower quarterly limit on all her credit cards.
Fax from your wife--she'll be late tonight. Corporate HQ has re-instated fourteen-hour work days until the end of this quarter. It's too bad she's not allowed to quit her job--you could get her a pretty sweet management position any time in your department at Microsoft.
This document is hereby released to the public domain. You may (and are encouraged to) reproduce, republish, read, modify, and/or archive it without limitation.
Orignal story by Accord MT
Write your own damn songs.
I do. I'm an improv pianist and perform in a classical choir, and in fact saw (back in the days of Napster) someone downloading a recording of said choir from me. Did I think "Oh, someone deprived us of a $10 CD?" Of course not.
Lyrics are part of music, and since music is broadcasted without "charging" for you to hear it (radio) than why in the world would ANYONE want to block someone from Displaying what they heard for free in a lyrical context. I thought the whole point of music was so you could hear it, not so we could prevent someone from reading it. While I can understand that some musicians would not want their lyrics misrepresented or displayed in a manor that takes away from the lyric's effect, I can't comprehend telling someone they can't display it as text. If a band wants to prevent misrepresentation (which is the ONLY reason I could see anyone getting upset) they should post their damn lyrics.
Whats next? preventing other interested musicians from creating tablature? Why don't we just halt creativity all together. I know that I have very strong influences on my creative works and I would hate to not be able to call upon them because a record label didn't want me to know WTF they were saying.
"This is the value of a summer spent and a winter earned"
The lyrics are probably a separately copyrighted work, so copying the lyrics is actually copying the whole work.
Even if considered as part of the song, the lyrics are not a "small part".
There's a _chance_ it's fair use, but most likely not. Copying a whole poem or book this way is the same thing. The fact that they're lyrics doesn't change the issue.
Think about Metallica's response to Napster. People like Fred Durst own music publishing companies, you can bet he'll side with the RIAA without a thought for fans. Just about the only path to an increased audience is through the major publishers. Look at the garbage they sell though, do you think many of the people getting famous today are actually artists in the sense of creating and deeply caring for what they do?
All available data suggest that regardless of any of this, the sun will still come up tomorrow.
I can't believe the posts I'm reading here, and how misunderstanding and unsympathetic you all are.
Song lyrics are poems. They are written by professional lyricists. A person who writes song lyrics holds a copyright on what he's written, and he needs to protect that copyright in order to earn a living. Lyricists for pop songs don't get paid salaries. Their only chance is to earn royalties from sales.
Weird Al Yankovic is an example. All of his hits are somebody else's music with Weird Al's lyrics. Lyrics are all he writes--well, he writes very little original music. For years he's had a message on his Web site urging his fans not to post his lyrics on Web pages, and not to read Web pages with his lyrics on them, because they violate his copyrights and reduce his ability to collect royalties on his work. If you want Al's lyrics, Al wants you to buy the CD with the lyric booklet in it.
One of the main reasons people buy CDs is so they get the booklet inside that contains the lyrics. In previous generations, people bought sheet music or collections of lyrics in books called "broadsides" if they wanted to read the lyrics. This is how lyricists made income.
If lyrics to copyrighted songs are posted all over the Internet, that's piracy. The person putting up the Web page is a pirate, and the people that read, download or copy those lyrics are committing piracy also.
From the tenor of the posts I've read here, it seems that all of you recognize that a song, and a recording of the song, are things that the artists have a right to own and protect, but you seem to think that for some reason lyrics are exempt from that. They are not. You wouldn't tell Gilbert and Sullivan that Sullivan had the rights to earn royalties from the music, but Gilbert did not, because he wrote only lyrics and those are free. Same with Rodgers and Hammerstein. Both the music and the lyrics are intellectual property, and each hold their own copyright.
This is the first tactic I use when trying to identify a song.
This space available.
Given that, normally, the songwriter (or his/her publishing company) holds the copyrights to music and lyrics, how is that the record labels are putting themselves in a position to enforce lyric copyright?
It's not "the record labels," it's Warner/Chappell, a music publishing company. A company like Warner/Chappell pays money to the songwriters for the exclusive rights to control publishing and reprinting of songs and lyrics. Therefore, they are very much in the position to complain about copyright infringement.
Michael
"No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality;..."
How can a post be modded "overrated" or "underrated" when it hasn't been rated yet?
Hell, I work at a music shop (boo me all you like, I need the money), and at least 3 customers a day are looking for a song they heard on the radio, but they never caught the song/artist.
So, I fire up a lyrics site (in my case, www.letssingit.com , as it's the only one I can access from work), and I search for the lyrics they gave me. Quite often I find the song and the album it's on, and they buy it. Now, if I didn't have a lyrics site to go to, those would be lost sales, as the customer wouldn't know what to buy.
On second thought, to hell with the lyrics sites. Let the industry lose sales if that's how they want to play it.