Slashdot Mirror
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."
If things keep progressing at this rate, and if they do start enforcing these fucking insane laws, it'll only be a matter of a few years before owning music is undesirable as it would be difficult ot prove any music is legit and could have you thrown into jail at any moment.
Why not just cut out all the BS and just make any kind of music ownership illegal. Musical instruments could be covered by the DMCA too since they can be used to copy (read play) a tune.
Oh that's we can't skip the BS right, because rich greed assholes can a make profit for a while this way.
Owning/buying music is quickly becoming no different morally to owning/buying blood diamonds. Hell, if they make musical instruments illegal perhaps the penalty for owning one could be that they cut off your hands.
IP law? It's just fucking entertainment. Get a grip!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
And I wonder what this will do to the next generation of musicians? Back when I began learning how to play guitar, much of my progress was because of the availability of free tab, which allowed me to play along with CDs. It would be grimly appropriate if the industries pushing this kind of litigation were shooting themselves in the foot when the talent pool in 20 years has shrunk down as a result.
Between the falling angel and the rising ape
so this means to get tabs i go to piratebay and snatch a massive .RAR or every song i could possibly want to play, right?
Snowden and Manning are heroes.
If I have spent my own time trying to figure out the tabs/sheet music of a song, why shouldn't I share it with millions of others who may want that song's tabs?? Just because it takes business away from some other people doesn't mean they can put restrictions on my freedom and willingness to share my effort. Its not as if I have stolen the tabs from someplace where they were being legally sold. Its my time that I've spent. So whats the solution to such a problem? Or does this end up as a stalemate? These people are curbing the free flow of information and knowledge. I myself have learned guitar by looking at countless tabs from OLGA and other sites.
All of OLGA can be zipped into like a 40mb file.
The music industry can't stop me from downloading a 300mb album.
The movie studios can't stop me from downloading an 1.4gb XviD.
The software industry can't stop me from downloading an 8gb ISO.
Who are these people kidding?
Hal Leonard claimed that the tabs are inaccurate, made by kids. If the tabs are really inaccurate, then I would think that the users of the tabs wouldn't be happy with them, and this alleged tab black market would disappear.
The tabs must, on the contrary, be reasonably accurate for Hal Leonard to be noticing any loss of business, which, as TFA explains, they probably aren't.
A young guy picks up a guitar and messes around with it. He can't play a thing, and isn't really interested in investing the time to take proper lessons. He discovers OLGA. He downloads a few simple tabs of Nirvana songs. He works his way up to Metallica, Alice in Chains. He eventually realizes his technique could use some improvement. He starts downloading Bach, Beethoven, etc., because they present more of a challenge. Eventually, he is playing complex works like Leyenda and Capricho Arabe.
Eventually, he notices there is something fundamentally different in the approach modern music takes from classical music. It "moves" differently. He starts to pay attention to the notes, chord changes, rhythms, and eventually decides that the IT career that he never really cared for just doesn't compete with the idea of learning and perhaps teaching music. He signs up for music theory at his local college. It turns out his technique is good, and he has a knack for music theory, he has perfect pitch, and has such a knack at piano that he has gone from barely being able to read a staff to playing Bach Preludes and Beethoven. All in all, a promising student. He has a 4.0 GPA and a letter of recommendation to one of the most prestigious music colleges in the US where he will study music theory.
Not so far fetched, that's me. I wouldn't be going for a masters in music theory (or composition, I haven't quite decided) had it not been for OLGA helping me learn that I have quite a knack for music to begin with. If I had to stick to public domain stuff, I probably would have given up. I simply didn't expect it to be anything but a hobby I did when I came home from programming all day. But OLGA got me started enough to realize that, for me at least, it was worth the investment.
Society benefits from the free and open spread of information. Copyright is just a means to that end: provide incentives for artists to continue creating. But IP is not Freedom of Speech or Habaeus Corpus - it is not a fundamental right. The DMCA hurts society, and I hope to God that somebody important pays attention to the fact that it is being used to shut down educational sites.
In fact, now that I think about it, nothing that was copyrighted after I was born will move into the public domain before I die of old age... That goes for me, you, my kids, anybody born within the past 20 years. Do you remember when it came out? Then you will never see it in the public domain. But no, apparently we need even tougher copyright controls, can't have people learning how to make the music that got you rich enough to buy the politicians who keep sponsoring idiotic legislation like the DMCA in the first place. Idiots.
That reminds me of this site: http://everything2.com/?node_id=1029506
He talks about a court case that determined only 4 notes had to be in common to violate copyright. With that logic, he determined that there are only 46,656 distinct melodies.
Assume that all songs use a Western musical scale and that such a scale contains twelve distinct intervals. Assume that a judge (not a musician but a judge) will distinguish three distinct note durations (which roughly correspond to eighth, quarter, and half notes, or through a trivial change in time signature, to quarter, half, and whole notes, or to sixteenth, eighth, and quarter notes). Thus, there are 36 possible distance vectors from one note to the next, and 36^(n - 1) melodies of n notes.
And not all of those would be worth listening to... so pretty much any 4-notes you play probably violate someone's copyright.
They do have a good point on the quality side of things...
Very, very few tabs on sites like Olga come even close to the quality of a decent tab book.
F5, A#5, G5, C5 may well be the chords to the main part of Teen Spirit but tells me nothing about strum patterns, rhythm, which strings I should be missing on certain strums, etc. It tells me nothing about C and F notes that chime out afterwards.
Ironically, for all the claims of "I'm not good enough to figure out how to play a song by ear..." - to use most online tabs, aside from getting pointed in the right direction, you really do need to have an ear for rhythm, an ear for when exactly the chord changes happen, what the strum patterns are, when to use up vs. downstrokes, etc.
There is a major problem in the printed music world that only better known artists merit the expense of producing a good tab book and that most of those books are only available via special order. Still, when they do exist, when you can find them (this is starting to sound like the A-Team), the world of difference between them and the average tab is astronomical.
I'm caught in the middle: I'd hate to see high quality publishing disappear but I also don't see low quality, text based tabs (that often have five different, all disagreeing, version) really being that much of a threat.
Then again, in a world where record companies are trying to shore up CD sales, about about including a DVD with video files of exactly what the artists' hands did when playing the songs, lyrics and scores included? Given the choice between iTunes' $0.99 a limited song and $1.29 an unlocked one, I'd rather drop $15 on an album that'll teach me how to play its content as well. Sure, on a one-off basis, those costs would be huge but if it were done for every album, economies of scale could turn it in to a day's filming, a quick editing job and a day or two of a cheap person transcribing it.