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.'"

Comments

Re:Sad but

[quest(answer)ion]

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.