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Song Sites Face Legal Crackdown
CaptainPotato writes "According to the BBC, the Music Publishers' Association is stepping up to launch the next phase in the music industry's battle against online music. The MPA is demanding jail time for the maintainers of websites offering unlicensed song scores and lyrics. The MPA President has stated that closing websites and imposing fines is not enough, stating that by 'throw [ing]in some jail time I think we'll be a little more effective' in its crusade." We just recently reported on the pearLyrics cease-and-desist order as well.
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
Now this just seems silly. Personally at least, I can tell you that I use lyrics sites for ONE primary purpose; to be able to find a song that I heard somewhere based on its lyrics, so I can then buy it. Seriously; that's all they are really useful to me for (of course, they can also be useful just to know the words of a song, but that's something else). What POSSIBLE benefit can they see in shutting something down that has a primary use of helping people to identify and purchase their product? Really, it just seems like madness.
As a musician i have only one thing to say:
Fuck you, music industry.
Nothing more to say.
I fail to see how protecting lyrics is a big deal when most songs consist of "oooh", "uhh" and "yeah". Can you really copyright grunts?
Really great plan. Take out sites that are probably used by many people (I am also one) to track down songs to buy.
These guys never met a good business plan or marketing scheme they didn't want to sue out of existence. The only reason they've survived this long is that they've been the only game in town.
Artists are already discovering that they can afford home studios and to self-publish their songs online, which (as recent studies indicate) helps market the small-time bands. I'm thinking that within 10-20 years, the RIAA companies will either be defunct or will have gotten out of the business.
Kythe
So a site that has a guitar tab to a song with the lyrics on it...is that unauthorized/unlicensed material that will now become "illegal"? That's just horrible if it's true. How much longer can these crazy corporations before they finally shoot themselves in both feet and fall down?
All music conservatories must now be shut down as they are producing students capable of transposing music from just listening to it and therefore becoming music pirates. I wonder if the people who own the sounds studios have the copyright for things like the sound a river makes. If so, our national parks are in danger of a lawsuit!
I am and always will be a stereotype, because who in their right mind prefers mono?
Enjoy our music. Music is for making money, not for enjoying! How dare you attempt to gain some sort of pleasure from the audio we worked so hard to sell you. Don't sing along. You will just use the wrong lyrics and sound stupid... Or worst yet, make our music sound stupid. Oh wait... too late. We are stupid!
Just my personal experience --
but I've bought a ton of cd's by listening to a song on the radio, writing down a random verse, and later googling that phrase to get to one of those cheesy lyric pages. I then can see what the song is, and what artist is making it.
Shut that down and you're gonna lose my sales.
I am not for illegal music downloading or for violating copyrights, etc.
However, jail time? That, to me at least, implies that society has been harmed in some measurable and somewhat significant way. Music lyrics? Is this after multiple warning to cease and desist?
Are they profiting off of this?
Obviously, I'm thinking outload here. But the main point is that jailing people is not something we should be deciding willy-nilly based on people from an industry that feels threatened.
It's one thing for them to want the state to help them in regards to illegal activity that affects their business. This is quite another.
Except for ending slavery, the Nazis, communism, & securing American independence, war has never solved anything.
How far can this go? For example, if I type, "Embrace me, surround me, as the rush comes." have I violated their intellectual property?
If it's illegal to transcribe all of the lyrics, what about half of them? One stanza? One line?
If you are reconstructing lyrics from listening to a song that they broadcast over public airwaves, what is illegal about me documenting what I heard?
Linux - Because Mommy taught me to Share.
DUDE: "Hey man, I just figured out the solo for [insert song here]. It's so cool to play."
OTHER DUDE: "Sweet, show me how it goes."
DUDE: "Um, I can't -- it's illegal. And don't tell anyone I figured it out myself. If anybody asks I bought the music."
In similar news, concertgoers will now be forbidden from watching the hands of musicians during the performance, lest they learn something about how a song is played without paying the proper royalties.
Sweet informative mod.
And I walked over to the bench there, and there's--Group W is where they put you if you may not be MORAL enough to join the army after committin' your special crime.
There was all kinds of mean, nasty and ugly-lookin' people on the bench there --there was mother rapers--father-stabbers, father-rapers! FATHER-RAPERS sittin' right there on the bench next to me!
And they was mean and nasty and ugly and horrible and crime fightin' guys were sittin' there on the bench, and the meaniest, ugliest, nastiest one--the meanest father-raper of them all--was comin' over to me.
And he was mean and nasty and horrible and all kinds of things, and he sat down next to me. He said, "Kid, what'd you get?"
I said, "I didn't get nothin'. I had to pay fifty dollars and pick up the garbage." He said, "What were you arrested FOR, kid?" and I said, "Litterin'."
And they all moved away from me on the bench there, with the hairy eyeball and all kinds of mean, nasty things, till I said, "And creatin' a nuisance."
And they all came back, shook my hand and we had a great time on the bench talkin' about crime, mother-stabbin', father-rapin', --all kinds of groovy things that we was talkin' about on the bench, and everything was fine.
Courtesy of this page. I wonder if it's illegal?
fast as fast can be. you'll never catch me.
Going the DIY route, bands may actually create a new industry. The will need touring promoters and facilitators. I smell an opportunity.
...that it appears this group isn't the "RIAA" companies per se, but rather an organization of sheet music/lyrics publishers.
Sheet music, I can understand. But lyrics? What the hell? There are only two reasons to look up lyrics online:
1) Curiosity about that "one line" you've never been able to understand
2) Finding a certain song's name
Neither will impact business, period. In fact, both promote the song, which very likely promotes the buying of sheet music.
This is quite possibly the dumbest thing I've seen in relation to the copyright wars. It's the clearest example yet of companies suing "because they can" and because of a complete lack of business sense, rather than because it's in the public (or even their) interest to do so.
No one, and I mean no one, is going to shell out cash to buy lyrics. A manufacturer might as well sue customers for saying good things about their product in an online forum.
Kythe
In the first instance, there's no more money to be made from me as I have already spent money - and I would refuse to pay to use a site that provides lyrics. Indeed, it would also discourage me from buying more music in the future from companies that endorse this approach.
In the second instance, there's also no money to be made from me as I won't be able to find the song by using its lyrics. Lose-lose for the music industry, it seems. To top it off, with this type of attitude, I'm also far less likely to purchase anything from companies pursuing this type of strategy.
That's why I stick with Internet radio and music from individuals, groups and companies that respect their fans, rather than trying to milk them for all that they are worth.
I'm not a musician, so I don't download tabs. Shutting down tab sites also seems pointless as any half-decent musician can pick up a song by listening to it. Every musician I know does it this way. Does this mean that the music industry wants to also jail musicians who learn by listening, rather than by buying officially sanctioned tabs and scores?
Silly me, I forget that all the great musicians learnt from the officially sanctioned sources, rather than listening and imitating their heroes... and that anybody who disagrees with what the music industry wants must be a pirate and thief.
I heard that your library burnt down and destroyed your only two books - and one was not even coloured in yet.
This is not a crimal statute, it is a civil statute that is being broken, so how do you end up in jail exactly? Oh, thats right buy your very own Senator or Congress person and you are half way there.
But...
Music lyrics are copyrighted material...
And the agents of the MPA are presumabley, agents of the songwriters. And they are requesting that their works be taken down.
So why the outrage? Are you suggesting that you have some right to the songwriter's works against their wishes?
My solution to this issue is to let the MPA get what they want. Hopefully smarter artists will, in the future, fill the void this creates.
Based on upvotes, Ageism is the only "-ism" Slashdotters care about and think isn't SJW
I've been learning how to play bass guitar for the past two years, mostly by downloading tablature and playing along with various songs. This certainly falls under fair use, specifically teaching and scholarship. I can play a few dozen songs by memory, none of which have been performed publicly (in fact, I've never done a public performance of any song). Please tell me how I am a threat to the artists or even the copyright holders of these songs. I can't wait to see the statistics on how much they're losing in sheet music sales to piracy ... likely somewhere in the billions of dollars.
Don't they know that many of their artists learned how to play music in much the same way, by hearing a song and effectively reverse engineering it? Elvis Costello didn't learn to read and write music until the mid 90s, nearly 20 years after his first album was released.Let them waste their money on lawyers "protecting" their "IP". It's just so amazing that these people are so devoted to making sure their copyrights are never infringed that they're going to dig themselves a grave. I, for one, can't wait.
What I think is possible is that the industry is moving past the idea of "open computing". What I mean by that is that boxes like the xbox360 will be the appliances that people use to check their email and to send/receive IMs, VOIP, etc. The idea of an operating system won't matter to the user, any more than it matters what software the plane you're in is running. Even pilots aren't too familiar with avionics, and it doesn't matter - as long as it works. Once the public has been conditioned to accept computing as this pervasive background thing, then DRM will establish a firm foothold and it becomes difficult for file trading because most won't know enough and won't care enough to mod/change their boxes (which may stop working if you try) in order to manipulate their software in order to trade files.
It all has to to with what generations grow up with. My nephew is 9 - and to him the internet is AOL. His mom is a member, and to him, the web is a place to check his email, play games, and find out information about more games. He knows of this thing called google - you ask it a question, and it gives you answers, but he doesn't like it too much because he feels like it doesn't answer them "right" most of the time. He already has preferred channels for getting his information. X-Play on G4 shapes his gaming opinions ("dude, how can you like that game? it only got 2 out of 5 on x-play!") - and the internet isn't this wide open place for him - but an aggregation of things his already likes to do at places he trusts and knows.
What frustrates him about the internet: Maybe like two years ago, I was babysitting, and we were watching the Discovery channel on rare spiders. He was so interested that he wanted to find out more. I suggested the internet. At the time (lol) whenever he wanted to find something out, he rationalized that the answer would be at www.nameofthatthing.com - in this case www.spider.com. So he typed that in... and suffice it to say, what he got had little to do with spiders.
It was a goth porn site. The main page was some chick with her tits out, nothing more than he'd seen on national geographic, but it made him really mad for some reason. He was like, "spider.com should be about spiders!" All of which is to say, to him the internet isn't ordered the way it should be. And I don't think that sentiment is totally incorrect. I think that the media congloms are slowly moving towards ordering it that way.
I hypothesize that the internet will become more ordered - less transparent - and places like blogs and message boards will be some of the few places average citizens will get to post... and registrations will be scrutinized and traffic will be analyzed... and the status quo will normalize. In this reality, file trading abates because the critical mass audience will be conditioned to accept the status quo - which is the internet as a background datastream - a stream that provides the water coming from your faucet but a stream that you don't DRINK FROM directly. Drink from the faucet - not from the stream. Disagree? Look at AOL commercials with its propaganda. (The internet is a dangerous place. We PROTECT YOU and your children and your money and your life.)
Unfortunately, I think the RIAA has the right idea - scare the kids with fear of litigation - (my nephew wanted the Rock Lobster clip from Family guy - I downloaded the torrent - and we laughed about it for like two hours until my sister made us delete it because she didn't want to get sued - my nephew has now internalized that meme - downloads are like shoplifting to him - which is to say wrong).
Don't get me wrong, I in no way support this. This is what I think is happening though.
un burrito me trampeó.
Now the stupid RIAA wants to end this. How this is going to help them is beyond me. Do they really think (as they apparently think regarding iPod hardware) that there's money to be extracted from these web-sites? Most seem to be a labor of love with likely little extra money to give to the greedy bastards. And I doubt that if you license the lyrics, that they will give them too you in machine-readable form. How many of these are captured and typed in by contributiors? Dumb all around.
Coming soon, how long before huming a song in public gets you jail time?
And is the MPAA suing the IMDB yet for giving movie plot summaries?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When (if?) this happens, in order for ANY device to play media, the media itself will have to be digitally "protected" with a key the device is capable of verifying. Independent artists will be virtually locked out from producing and distributing media themselves (to any kind of mass audience) and will be required to go through those holding the keys. Who will that be? The big boys: MPAA & RIAA members, etc.
Frankly, this is the only rational reason for the sound and fury these organizations produce in regards to piracy. The amount of money they claim they lose to piracy is a fictional number. They made it up. There is no true way to know how much they are losing due to piracy and there are contra-indicative numbers showing it leads to more sales, not less. But whether they really lose money to piracy or not is beside the point.
They will lose everything when they lose control of the media distribution channel. And that, folks, is the real reason for all the lobbying efforts. It ain't about losing some money today. It's about losing all of it tomorrow.
But you all knew that already, didn't you?
with a DJ not (usually) announcing who a song is by, how am I supposed to find out what the name of the song is? as it stands now, if I remember a bit of the lyrics I can punch them into google and usually find the song... on a lyrics site... so no lyric sites, no finding out what the name of the song was, no sale... duh!
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
-1 False Analogy!
You're using her as bait, Master!
My guess is that the MPA, or individual members thereof, are planning to launch their own for-profit, possibly subscription based, lyrics website.
That's the only explanation I can think of. The RIAA wants to eliminate free/pirated downloads becuase it cuts into their album sales, or their pay-download site profits. The MPA wants to eliminate free guitar tabs so they can charge instrumentalists for sheet music. IN both cases, there is a for-profit, legal market for those goods. MPA members cannot currently profit in any way from the desire of music fans to know or look up lyrics. So why shut down lyrics sites unless they're planning to find a way to make it profitable for them...
And what "criminal" law are they breaking ? This is a CIVIL law, not criminal law
UPS Sucks