Slashdot Mirror
Warner Chappell Apology For PearLyrics
RacerZero writes "The recent Slashdot story Music Should Be Heard But Not Understood sparked a good deal of discussion about the overreaction of music industry heavyweights. This week Wired is running an apology from Warner Chappel music for their poor judgement. From the article: 'Facing an upswell of protest, Warner Chappell Music on Friday formally apologized to Walter Ritter over a letter it sent to the software programmer earlier this month targeting a helper application for Apple's iTunes called pearLyrics.'"
According to the article, Apple immediately removed the link to this software. With their teams of lawyers you figure they could have performed a proper review of the claim and seen it was just another case of Goliath bullying around innocent people.
But lest we forget, Apple can never be wrong, even when your money goes to line the pockets of Bill Gates.
As an artist, I hope this becomes a trend where music companys realize that our music is art and not just small green pieces of paper. I'm glad that this guy got an apology!
Is there heaven? Is there Hell? Is that a Tuna Melt I smell?-Primus
Emphasis added.
If there is money to be made by "selling" access to lyrics, I think they'll try to get all other sites ruled as "illegal" because they are "unlicensed".
I think they're still focused on getting every last cent they can from the public, in any fashion, for the music / lyrics / art / whatever.
reactionary it may be, but absurd it is not. Ritter's reaction to this whole 'cease and desist' business is exactly the effect they're looking to have with legalistic strong-arm moves: scaring small developers without the financial resources for a legal fight, preventing them from innovating in directions that will challenge the current--legally delineated--status quo as far as how music is published and distributed.
IANAL, but lyrics are also copyrighted material, and someone needs to get permission from the owner of that copyright before doing anything with them. personally, i fail to see how reproducing the material with correct attribution (as in a searchable website or database with song lyrics) is problematic, but hey.
the *real* point here, as others have posted, is not that this litigation was spurious, but that the "record company lawyers" actually successfully managed to make a reasonable call as to whether a bit of software was worth persecuting based not on the legality of its use of copyrighted material, but rather on whether that use of said copyrighted material was damaging. this actually represents a step away from blind legalism toward a more considered stance on what actually constitutes harmful copyright infringement. if this turns out well for pearLyrics, it might actually encourage development of online resources for music-related info.
so kudos, thanks for not *totally* skewering a small developer.
/. is what happens when geeks talk. get used to it.
Back in the '60s the sheet music for a song cost more than the 45 RPM record, and you got 2 songs on the record and only one on the sheet music.
One could spend their entire life and career tracking down all the songs that got included on albums not because they were good but because of who would make money because of owning the publishing rights.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
The record companies followed the true American dream of quick profits at the expense of quality and longevity.
The artists they promote are the musical equivalent of rubber dog shit, fake vomit and whoopie cushions.
Good for a few moments of entertainment, but not really worth the money it costs.
It's obvious the Artist of the day is just a new texture of vomit or a new scent of shit.
That's why the industry burns through them so quick, they are disposable products to the execs.
Given the mass bombardment of the crap on the airwaves, it's no suprise people don't buy CDs at
the rate they used to. I'm sick of the crap the first week a new single comes out. Luckily that
same single will still be on the playlist 3 years from now. The radio no longer entices me to get
to the record store to buy the CD I want, it reminds me of why I haven't been to the record store since
the 90s.
Anyways, I don't know anyone who blows a hard earned paycheck on adding to their rubber vomit collection on a frequent basis.
A realistic business plan ?
1) Leave the faith based community. A lot of their statistics assume people want to own this crap.
That in itself requires a greater leap of faith for me than the flying spaghetti monster.
2)Join the real world. The music that will be worth promoting is on mix tapes being distributed underground, small clubs, and lately in peoples homes. Come up with a way to capture the home recording artist without taking advantage of them. The artist already figured out they don't need the record companies. $0.03 a sale from the industry execs for a million album sales at $20 an alubum is the same amount of profit as Ten thousand sales of CDs direct to the consumer when sold for $5 a disc.
3) Profit less. We know how much a CD cost, we know how much color ink costs, we know how much the studio time costs.
$18 for a CD is outrageous. This price is only supported because of the monopoly they have over the distribution channels.
it begins with a lie "Based upon our common goal of helping consumers "
and ends with a lie "the benefit of consumers and artists"
straight from RIAA Economics 101
Obviously, you fail to understand the relationship of Warner-Chappell and the songwriters that they represent. Warner-Chappell is in the business of making sure that the songwriters that they represent are fairly and justly compensated for their works. It is the job of Warner-Chappell to ensure that the songwriters that they represent are not taken advantage of or denied fair compensation.
As long as pearLyrics adheres to the spirit of informing listeners to what the songwriters have written, I am sure that the songwriters that Warner-Chappell represent have no problems with what pearLyrics is doing. It is when an entity tries to profit at the expense of the songwriters in question that Warner-Chappell has to step in and flex its muscles.
Warner-Chappell's lawyers probably overreacted when it first saw what Walter Ritter had done. Odds are, some songwriters that Warner-Chappell represent told them to lighten up and back off.
The current distortion of the copyright system (endless extensions to copyright, multinational corporations going after individuals) is beginning to defeat the entire frakkin' point of having copyright in the first place: the encouragement of ideas to advance literature, music, science, and technology.
From the Wired article:
One of Ritter's recent brainstorms -- an application that queries lyrics data online to help music fans choose tracks based on themes, like "love" or "breakup" -- may now remain only an idea, he says.An apology from Warner Chapell (dear God how many components of the Time Warner omni-media complex exist?) doesn't eliminate the reality that they would rather use copyright to ensure that technology develops only the way they want it to, extending their cartel into the far future. They've already won on the legal front - copyright extensions far past the death of the author - now they blatantly want to control technology through legal terror.
/* Dang, I can't type that well. */
Hearing impaired people enjoy music too, but perhaps in ways slightly different than the main stream of music fans. I wonder if this action could be considered discrimination against the hearing impaired?