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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.'"
apology ? from who ? i..i...head explodes.....
I have a new idea for an MBA course. It will be called "Don't prosecute your customers when they try to advertise your product". I'm not sure if we'll be able to fit it into a single semester though.
What are you eating? isItVeg?.
Yes, here: http://www.pearworks.com/pages/pearLyrics.html
"Based upon our common goal of helping consumers enjoy the song lyrics they want - and our common belief that technology can help to transform the music industry to the benefit of consumers and artists alike - we are committed to working together to provide consumers a convenient, legal way to find accurate song lyrics.
The goal of Warner/Chappell's prior letter to pearworks was to gain assurance that pearLyrics operated according to those principles. However, in both tone and substance, that letter was an inappropriate manner in which to convey that inquiry. Warner/Chappell apologizes to Walter Ritter and pearworks.
Our solution will adhere to our shared belief that songwriters must be fairly compensated for their work and that legitimate web sites with accurate lyrics must not be undermined by unlicensed web sites.
We look forward to working together, and to helping to advance the evolution of the music industry cooperatively for the benefit of consumers and artists alike."
If I have nothing to hide, you have no reason to search me
Does this mean Hendrix stops kissing guys?
Purple, because ice cream has no bones.
"First, We kill all the lawyers"
the music industry has gotten so paranoid that free advertising is seen as a mortal threat.
a friend of mine who is in the business told me recently:
Oh, I love these "the big record companies are Satan" kind of posts.
All my friends at big record companies would vastly prefer this to be the case as opposed to the reality:
the big record companies don't have a clue and are scared they won't exist in ten years.
that last bit is interesting:
and are scared they won't exist in ten years.
Of course, the paranoia doesn't help, and still leaves us with the question of what would be a realistic business plan they could follow.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
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.
Sorry they got caught. Sorry people reacted the way they did.
What makes me think that if no-one had noticed, they'd have taken this thing right through to the bitter end, even if it meant ruining the poor guy?
It's official. Most of you are morons.
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.
Another sad thing is the chilling effect on further development of anything associated with the music industry and music lovers in general. As was said in the article:
A search feature like that could actually HELP the music industry (as well as listeners) by leading potential customers to new 'must have' songs for their collections.The short-sighted, overly litigatious folks in the music industry are the ones causing the majority of the problems for their industry. The world has changed over the last century, and they need to look ahead rather than behind in shaping their business.
--
Tomas
RTFL from the EFF. It wasn't the volume of opinion or all your voices or a realization that pearLyrics might be beneficial to them or a conscience--it was the potential liability for damages from misrepresenting a non-infringement to the developer's ISP as an infringement that caught their eye. They would very likely have lost and paid out money not even adding the insult of losing in court and having that all over the web. They have no conscience--this was simply fear and greed in action. They had the legal tables turned on them, saw a potential loss staring them in the face, and gave up--defeat is not an indication of remorse or conscience--it is just defeat, no more, no less.
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. */