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Threat To Free, Legal Guitar Tablature Online
An anonymous reader writes "Recently Hal Leonard Corporation, the world's largest songbook publisher, sent an email to the music publishing and copyright community urging them not to license guitar tablature for free, advertising-supported use online. The email includes a number of factual errors and was potentially very damaging to the potential for a free, legal, and licensed destination for guitar tab online. Musicnotes and MXTabs have posted the full letter along with their response."
The Harry Fox Agency, which got its rights to "mechanical reproduction of music" by getting monopoly control over the piano roll market a century ago, has already taken down most tablature from the Web on its flimsy pretext to copyright (and its big lawyer and lobbyist payroll).
Tablatures are interpretations of the music as heard by someone. They're not even the public performance of music that whistling your favorite song as you walk down the street would be. But once public places are comprehensively wired for sound and video, Harry Fox will be sending you a bill for every time you do just that.
These insane government monopolies on content already part of folklore, from which folk activity they get nearly all their current value, must end. They are justified in the Constitution as a compromise with 1700s economics only "to promote progress in science and the useful arts". Instead, they now prohibit that progress. Copyrights must end no later than after a human generation of publication, shorter for media other than songs and books, and probably earlier than when 10x their registered production investment is recouped.
--
make install -not war
just pick up your guitar and play.
Lots of the larger tabs sites have had takedown messages sent to them (example here), which, quite frankly, sucks if you're trying to learn to play.
You can learn a lot about a person if you just take the time to inject them with sodium pentathol
Hey when the RIAA claims earnings from music they are not holding contracts for and if you write a song and provide the tabs for free and you get a SAD order it is infuriating.
Its just a 'machine' like spam, it just gaming the largest distribution of cheap opportunities and attempting to get a few hits. Its also maximizing any other opportunities it can along the way that may come of it, charging more for licenses, and creating markets for DRM.
Some day they will make a 'legal' mechanism against this 'rackets', just need one of these guys to fall first so racketeering charges can be brought.
members are seeing something, your seeing an ad
Guitar tabs should be free to share, yes.
But if guitar tabs for any given song are even based on the original song, that makes those tabs a derivative work. The original copyright holders are given some say on how derivative works are published--or in this case, not published.
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
That may be the case in Australia (based on your au TLD), I can't say for sure, but it's definitely not the case in the U.S. If I download something from a server that's copyrighted, without authorization, both the client (me) and the server are violating copyright. I'm doing the copying, and the operator of the server is probably in violation themselves (for making the copy that's present on the server), but also for distribution and contributory infringement.
This is why, for example, the RIAA can go after music downloaders, as well as uploaders. Generally it's easier and more effective to go after the distributors of unauthorized content rather than the end users, but the law allows for a "demand side" approach as well.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
"We're sorry, but we are unable to show you this digital sheet music. That would require our Viewer plugin, which is not yet available for your current web browser and/or operating system."
They ought to consider using open formats like MusicXML and running the picture||PDF generator for the browser to show on the server-end.
Beyond that, why do web authors continually insist on fixed width pages where upped font sizes will never work and plus it looks bad? My Firefox is set to 12 pt minimum so it messes up that page. Ever since I really started looking into web accessibility like a year ago, I have stemmed away from using invisible tables for page layout and fixed width for my designs.
Good attempt at diverting attention, but GP is quite right with regards to the purpose of copyright and how it should work in this case. You might want to realize that in quite a few older and easier recognized situations, copyright has provisions for educational use.