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Guitartabs.com Suspends Under Legal Pressure
Music publishers are stepping up their campaign to remove guitar tablature from the Net. Recently Guitartabs.com received a nastygram from lawyers for the National Music Publishers Association and The Music Publishers Association of America. These organizations want to stretch the definition of their intellectual property to include by-ear transcriptions of music. Guitartabs.com is currently not offering tablature while the owner evaluates his legal options.
two, too, to. Sigh...
No stairway. Denied!
First of all, I'm against the whole 'I thought of it first so I have the only rights to it forever' thing.
But if a song is IP, why does it matter how it was copied? Copying it by looking at the paper, or copying by listening... It only takes a more talented individual.
It's like saying that it's legal to copy DVDs, but only if you're talented enough to crack the encryption yourself, with no help.
It either IS or IS NOT legal to copy it, there should be no 'only if by this method' BS.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
As far as I can tell, if I transcribe a song into tab, it is my work, not theirs. The IP was for the recodring of the song, so it's not RIA's property. Since, as I said before, I transcribed it myself, it is not their work (the publishers) but my own. How the f8ck can they assume they won everything? How do the artists feel about this?
I have not yet decided what response is appropriate. Ummmm.. the appropriate response is to forward their communications to your ISP and wait until they send the DMCA takedown. When they do, file the appropriate DMCA response outlining why the material isn't infringing. Your ISP simply cannot remove your material if you follow the procedure. Then, if they were doing anything more than bluffing, they will send you a proper cease and desist, which you can then choose to ignore, and, very unlikely now, wait until they file suit. All of this will take YEARS and cost them many hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees which I'm sure they'll quickly realize they can't recover from you, and, as such, they won't bother.
Don't give in to bullies.. the law is on your side.
How we know is more important than what we know.
The letter essentially says "Die. Now." And faced with overwhelming force, that's just what guitartabs.com did. The ugliest part of the letter, though, is probably this:
"Under the circumstances, both the transcriber of the compositions and you as the owner of the website are copyright infringers."
And they're right. Under copyright law, merely transcribing a song by ear (even without sending it to a website) is copyright infringement. Specifically, unauthorized creation of a derivative work. That is an illustration of how nasty and flawed the entire system of copyright is.
What's the difference between listening to a song so you can guess at the tablature and publishing that
and
Reading a book so you can publish a review (with spoilers and character names)?
You cannot use those characters in your own book without licensing them. You cannot use that tablature in your own song without licensing it.
This is about personal, private usage.
National Music Publishers Association?
The Music Publishers Association of America???
Isn't the RIAA enough??
You Americans hate music... huh?
guitartabs.com was just a large ad circle and never really brought you to much music. thank you RIAA/DMCA. now google will stop listing guitartabs.com as the highest rated response when i look for music
Are we to believe that there has been some new revolution in the ability of a musician to transcribe things by ear? Why would this longstanding exemption suddenly need changing? hmmm... perhaps Greed? Face it the only reason people are going to by a tabliture of your damn song is if they are a FAN. So they probably already own the album and love the song. They are just still developing as a musician and need the help of the more talented musicians at guitartabs to help them figure out how to play this song that they love. That is something to be encouraged if you want your music to have influence and you want to nuture growing musicians. The whole point of music copywright is to foster a good environment for new works. Or at least it used to be, but I guess that is an outdated idea this days.
We are all just people.
Certainly I think it is important to raise the issue of this bullying, and misuse of the law. However, this is certainly not the first example of them doing this, surely it is in the tablature websites' interests to create their own not-for-profit organisation to defend themselves. Anyway, As far as I can see, the huge amount of time the lawsuits take, and assuming the site takes down the offending material during it, the MPA has won anyway, no income for years, loss of all their users, and possible loss of the lawsuit means the site is in big trouble no matter what.
What a coincidence. When I take this fantastically bad composition titles "Fgnvejnl Gb Urnira" and alter the notes in a certain pattern, I get Stairway To Heaven.
Metaltabs.com recently went through this as well. Their solution was to get the permission of either the record labels or the bands themselves to publish tabs on their site. Of the ones who have responded, about 90-95% are giving permission. I wonder if guitartabs would have the same luck.
To within half a percent, pi seconds is a nanocentury. -- Tom Duff
They listened to the song and wrote down the notes for the separate instruments. That appears more like reverse engineering to me, which IS legal.
musicians smoke too much pot and drink excessively all the while stealing from society, retiring from their glamorous lives into a perpetual state of welfare state addiction. About time somebody did something about these cultural bloodsuckers.
This more or less is one step away from the music industry filing a complaint against someone for remembering, and whistling to a melody under their copyright. I do believe that the correct response to this is to simply ignore all products coming out of the MAFIAA companies. No purchases, no pirating, nothing. Maybe ignoring them totally is a lesson they will learn from. //Svein
Hi, I'm a signature virus. Copy my to your ~/.signature to help me spread.
What's the difference between listening to a song so you can guess at the tablature and publishing that ... This is about personal, private usage.
"Publishing" is not "personal, private usage". Fair use is not republishing. Fair use is sitting in your personal space looking at the tablature and playing. It probably includes looking at your tablature and performing it in a public venue with the appropriate payments made to whatever organization "collects" the performance royalties. However publishing that tablature on the web (distribution) is something entirely different. I *am not* saying it is something bad, just that it is something that is not fair use.
Another dead revenue model that they haven't realized won't work anymore. Search yer favorite P2P client/ torrents for PDFs named $band tab . Have fun!
to sing in the car?
The practise of "copying-by-listening"..is absolutly....completly....100% L E G A L. Don't believe me?... about 90% of you are sitting in front of a piece of technology that is wholely depedented on it's practise. I hope that someway somehow, these folks have an attorney with even 1/4 of a Brain. The amount of case law on this, is simply staggering. This is, start-to-finish, 100%, known as Reverse Engineering. The only difference is here the musician/engineer isn't providing these to a attorney, he is posting them on a site. The middle-man is then providing them to a "Virgin" party, for replication. This practice by which many of the largest Technoogy companies, not only brought into practise on a wide scale in the "Silicon Valley Rush" of the 1980's., but formed the finiancial foundations that thier enables thier current success today. This practice, is a very large reason, we have the wonderful benifit accross the world of cheap, reliable, and INCREDIBLY useful technology. I wish people could see past their own pocketbooks... or at least realize the ENTIRITY of the costs, over the long term. People need to be upset with things like this, the RIAA, and others that can't seem to grasp that they may not have all the ideas, and might not even be applying the few really really good ones, to maximum benifit. This one of the very fundementals of a Keynesian Economics, on which our economy is based. When the markets are allowed to be free, we all benifit. This isn't pie-in-the-sky dreaming...this is academicly accepted, real-world v
I don't think this is legal, but nevermind that. This isn't Right(tm).
How does new music come to be? Do you think a good (and creative) musician got to be that good all by himself? The way I learned music is (1) by listening to good music, (2) by trying to figure out how the piece worked and what made it satisfying and (3) trying to recreate the same effect on my own. Most of the times, on at least one of those steps, I needed somebody else's help. Either in getting to know new music, in figuring out the chords or in learning to play in new ways.
I couldn't have played the way I do without this help, and I have OLGA to thank for a large piece of that. Of course, I got a lot of help from my friends and teachers, but the sort of collaboration that is possible on the net is, I believe, a real boon for every musician, of every level, from beginner to professional. Then again, who's to say if my friend telling me (or writing down for me to play) the chords to a copyrighted song is legal!?
My point being, this kind of litigation has only one effect, and that is to suffocate creativity and the growth of our culture.
Yes, but be honest: Most of the tabs from Metaltabs are not from works of major artists published by major labels. There is a HUGE difference here.
Are we to believe that there has been some new revolution in the ability of a musician to transcribe things by ear? Why would this longstanding exemption suddenly need changing?
That is a misrepresentation, a straw man. Transcribing is not the issue. Publishing the transcription, in effect republishing the original artist's work, is the issue.
hmmm... perhaps Greed?
Who's greed? The greed of the owner of the copyrighted work who wishes to control publication or the greed of the web site operator who wants ad revenue?
In that case, no book reviews or movie reviews or any other review would ever be legal without express permission.
I can publish a movie review complete with character names, plot and spoilers.
You can read my movie review and write your own, private, screen play with that same plot and characters and events.
Two examples of "fair use".
I was under the impression that one of the key points of fair use was for criticism and parody.. both forms of "republishing" as you describe it. Fair use doctrine does look favorably on uses which are "personal" and "private" but that is hardly the whole story.
How we know is more important than what we know.
If they succeed here then it will affect every musicican out there who writes their own songs.
Why?
If the write down just TWO Notes then there will most likely be some other works of music that uses those same two notes in that sequence. If that piece of music is copyrighted then tough luck, you are in violation of the prior art's copyright which will pprobably be in violation of a previous piece of work. Repeat this back in time until the legal period of copyright has expired.
IMHO, Any TWO notes is a sequence can pretty well be regarded as a SAMPLE of a previous work. If so then it can be regarded in the strictest opinion of the law a breach of copyright.
As an alternative, think of what this could mean to journalism
There you are at a press conference and you write down in shorthand, the words of the person speaking. Those words are thier copyright buy by writting them down, you have then violated that copyright. Gtanted, your copy might not me 100% accurate but shouldn't the same law apply?
After all, aren't you writing down the sounds you have heard? What is the differenct between the spoke word and music? They are after all, just vibrations in the atmosphere.
IANAL etc
I'd rather be riding my '63 Triumph T120.
""Publishing" is not "personal, private usage". Fair use is not republishing. Fair use is sitting in your personal space looking at the tablature and playing."
In that case, no book reviews or movie reviews or any other review would ever be legal without express permission.
That is a straw man argument. It is also severely flawed on its face, reviews contain excerpts not the entire work.
I think the argument with guitar tabs *used* to be that legitimate publishers of tab books would lose out because people could get tabs that were accurate enough for free online. I've played guitar for 15 years, and spent lots of time in guitar shops. I've never seen ANYONE buy one of those tab books. You can go into a guitar shop and look at the rack of tab books, then go back in 5 years and see all the same ones with more dust on them. This has been going on since before there were thousands of tab websites around.
I don't know what the argument against tab sites is NOW, but from my understanding of IP/Copyright laws, corporations don't actually NEED valid reasons to harass and sue people.
I wonder who is the owner of this tune :
1-1-4-1-5-4-1-5
Three chords that are the base, in that very same order, of at least one third of every rock'n'roll and blues tunes known by human.
Guitar tabs are not the tune. The tune is the combination of the melody, the lyrics, the chords, the arrangements and the feeling of the band. Finally, this story is all again a try to patent the wheel.
I hate all sigs, mine included.
Personally, I love tab sites, and I think they should continue. But the argument that it's reverse engineering is not a way to fight this fight. The problem with the reverse engineering argument is that reverse engineering is a way to get around a patent. Songs aren't protected by patents, they are protected under copyright.
On top of that, the process isn't even the same. Reverse engineering takes place in clean rooms where the reverse engineering team are shielded from the actual product they're trying to copy. Not the case with transcribing a song - the transcriber listens to the song, so the transcriber is contaminated. The only way the concept of reverse engineering could even work would be if the person who did the transcription never listened to the song. Not going to happen. Transcribing a song is like listening to an audiobook, typing the words into your laptop and calling it an original work.
Since apparently the only requirement is something sounding similar, I recommend they start suing each other. There are hundreds if not thousands but these are a few suggestions off the top of my head to get them started:
Metallica has a good case against Kid Rock since American Badass sounds like Sad But True.
The Beatles should have sued the Monkeys for ripping off Paperback writer to bring up Last Train to Clarksville.
How about Don Henley's End of the Innocence and Bruce Hornsby's Thats Just The Way It Is".
Rod Stewart should sue Kiss for Hard Luck Woman its a complete copy of You Wear It Well.
A-Ha's take on me completely lifted the Police's Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.
Linkin Park should sue itself for making Pushing Me Avway and Numb which are nearly identical musically. Ditto for Nickelback.
While we are at it, lets just make it illegal to play any song using 12 bar blues
> But if a song is IP, why does it matter how it was copied? Copying it by looking at the paper, or copying by listening...
It has come to our attention that your brain makes available so-called "remembered" versions of copyrighted musical compositions owned or controlled by members of the NMPA and MPA, without permission from the publishers.
The versions of these publishers' musical works that you store in your brain are not exempt under copyright law. In fact, U.S. copyright law specifically provides that the right to make and distribute arrangements, adaptations, abridgements, or transcriptions of copyrighted musical works, including lyrics, belongs exclusively to the copyright owner of that work. Many, if not all, of the compositions in your brain, including the works listed on Schedule A, are protected by copyright. Therefore, you needed, but did not obtain, permission from the copyright owners to make a "remembered" version of those songs and to store them in your brain.
In short, we ask that you promptly remove all unauthorized copyrighted material from your brain and confirm its removal to us in writing. We anticipate and expect your cooperation in this matter. However, in the event that you choose to ignore this request, we shall press our demand that your brain be removed.
Sincerely,
Ross J. Charap
I have long been of the understanding that an original, by-ear transcription of a song, which is a duplicate of no copyrighted work and which generally deviates substantially from the work on which it is based is the property of its transcriber, and not the original composer of the song.
Where did he get that weird idea? If that were the case, composers would never get paid anything.
Remember, this isn't about a copyright of the performance, which is what the RIAA is about. It's about a copyright of the original composition, the composer's and songwriter's copyright.
A
Blah blah blah blah-dy blah blah blah,
D A
Blah blah blah blah-dy blah blah blah.
D
Blah blah-dy blah blah, blah blah blah,
A
Blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.
E7 D
Blah, blah blah; blah blah blah.
A
Blah! Blah blah blah.
There, I've just written some chords for a song I made up. But you know what? Those chords are NOT COPYRIGHTABLE. The lyrics are (and if you record and distribute a song with these lyrics without paying me royalties, I'll come after you). The melody is, but I haven't written that down. The arrangement is (harmonies, instrumentation, etc.) but I haven't written that down either. The chords themselves are not. This is data, information about how the song is put together - not art.
By the way, this particular series of chords (transposed into all 24 major and minor keys) is used in hundreds if not THOUSANDS of different songs.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
we just like money more.
This wouldn't be so bad except for the fact that the publishing companies aren't providing a product that we can buy. The quality of most user-submitted tabs is pretty terrible, and I'd gladly pay a small free to get something accurate. Sure, there are tab books, but those are usually only in print for a short time, plus buying a $30 book because you want to learn one song is kind of ridiculous.
Personally, I feel that it is perfectly cool to transcribe a piece of music (either with your ear or via some sort of software) and pass it around amongst your friends for free. I feel that you're crossing the line when you take that same song and start making money from it, whether it's performing it on stage at a paying gig without paying royalties, or posting it to a website that generates revenue for you via advertising. The sites in question are presumably making money from posting somebody else's creative work.
Same thing goes in my mind for P2P sharing. If you are making a huge amount of money by facilitating file sharing like Napster was, I think you're in the wrong.
Of course, copyright law as it stands says otherwise (at least in the USA), but Law has a mixed record in aligning itself with what is "right" in my mind.
...is not to publish the individual notes themselves. Instead, just post the chord changes. Chord changes can NOT be copy-written or is there protection.
Nothing fancy. For instance, here is the chord changes for "Hey Joe". C-G-D-A-E......there, come arrest me.
That's the chord changes, then it's up to the musician to listen to how Jimi Hendrix did it inside of those chord changes when he made his cover of the song....which is actually better than to read a transcription anyway as if you figure it out for yourself, it will make you a better player.
Posting chord changes at least points you in the right direction.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
we called a legal threat a "nastygram"- they're sure to take us serious now!
Personally, my friends and I use Internet tabs. Part of it is that we lack the appropriate funds to buy tabs, but we also only want specific songs instead of a whole crapload of other garbage that we don't want! If I only like one song from Band Q and the only place I can get the tab for it is in a book with all the 5627 other songs Band Q made, and the thing costs $500 (or whatever it all costs these days), and there's a tab on the Net with reasonable accuracy, you know where I'm going to go. Agree/Disagree? Also, it's true that I-net tabs aren't necessarily as accurate as the "official" ones, but doesn't that leave a little room for improv if you want to sound different from someone? Have a little creative edge? One cannot censor the will of the people.
I fight the enemy in my Sopwith Camel...and the enemy is the RIAA--er, Red Baron.
Our species thirsts for knowledge, striving for ever greater understanding of all the facets of the organic and the inorganic, as well as thought and form, including music.
We've progressed by sharing information for thousands of years and that included songs and music for worship, history, mythology, and just plain fun. Anyone who would restrinct that geneticly instilled curiosity, regardless of their claims of "protection" actually does far more harm than good.
Simply put, it's unnatural for us to not share information. Musicians understand it, they (borrow) are influenced by other musicians and their music so why can't the people that represent those same artists get with the program?
There are only 10 kinds of people in the world. Those that understand binary and those that don't.
I'm still waiting for the RIAA to start sueing folks that are walking down the street humming a tune. That's got to be the next phase of this lunacy.
What if some insane person did the transcription and he totally put the wrong notes in for the tab? Can they sue for that?
Maybe post the tab, but everything is transcribed one note up.
I mean, how far can they go? What if there's a post somewhere discussing Zeppelins "The Rain Song" and it's weird DGCGCD (which I think is the tuning for electric, a slightly different tuning goes for acoustic) tuning, can they go after them as well, because in that tuning, the guitar practically plays the song itself. I mean, it's stupid easy to play The Rain Song in that tuning.
"Leo Fender was in a 'state of grace' when he designed the Stratocaster." -- Paul Reed Smith
they started by trying to control the electrical impulses some refer to as, 1's and 0's... now they want to control vibrations in air molecules.
having the skill to hear something and replay it on an instrument is a gift.
i'm a musician and to me they're fighting an uphill battle with a bunch of smashed glass at the bottom awaiting their failure.
The worst they can do is start sueing guitar and bass players.
I've played guitar for over 25 years. If I sit down and transcribe a song to tab by ear, is that not reverse engineering? Isn't that supposed to be allowwed? I don't have the original music, so in effect I'm creating it all over in a clean room approach to 'look and feel' like another song. The tabs you see out there are rarely 100% accurate representations of the original music.
This is just silly BS. I'm tempted to start posting tabs all over the place. Tab tshirts, anyone?
Anyone who can play by ear should be sued every time they listen to music.
On top of that, if you play a song written by someone else at a gig or even in your own home you are infringing on said persons copyrights and should be burned at the stakes.
Why does the music industry want to kill itself so badly?
Do any other guitarists out there remember when this happened in the mid-late nineties with the OLGA tab archives? The not-for-profit archive was decentralized at the last minute and allowed users to download the entire thing. OLGA images are still out there circulating, even though the MPAA eventually destroyed its online presence. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OLGA)
You know, this reeks of youtube vs viacom. This guy is posting the letter on his site, which he didn't write, but yet he has ads. I sure hope he's sending Moses and Singer the revenue! This guy's a blatant pirate! -- Quick! Shoot this grain of salt before the information gets to your brain!
Fakebooks (books of sheetmusic from ear trascriptions) have been around for many decades. If they win, this will be precedent setting, and well could kill the fakebook publishing industry as well. This is nuts.
Anyone who's ever bought a legally produced tabs book knows just how good they are. Wrong key, wrong chords, no capo info, no tuning info. Just like most of the stuff you can find on the net, which pretty much kills their revenue and quadruples the cost of producing it accurately, having to actually hire musicians for scale. Are they claiming the copyright to selling us completely inaccurate garbage? Or are they trying to bully us into buying in to their version of reality? If they had any sense they would buy in to ours, and know any serious musician would buy the tabs if they knew the companies would get it right, and the musicians who translated it and wrote it would actually see some revenue from the game. Who actually did the work, the publisher? Not. I can print as many pages as I want for 2.5 cents a sheet.
Please tell, how is tablature "the entire work"?
Well to reply to my own post, I suppose it might be an "entire work" because it takes in a song from beginning to end, but that doesn't in my mind qualify it as "entire". I can hum many songs from beginning to end. I could sit at a keyboard and create a decent sized fake book in an afternoon. I suppose this issue isn't black and white and won't go away quickly. My personal desire is for a bit looser permissions regarding fake books and tablature. It actually offers a real boost to the music in question. Locking things down will have a negative effect that is underappreciated by publishers and some artists.
i just went to there site and downloaded weezer tab.
You can still grab many of the tabs by going back into the cache files. Here's Muse's Hysteria
I can hear pretty much every chord one would encounter in the typical rock song. Typical, ie not Steve Vai and not some wacked out jazz chords. I can "see" how to play the song, usually before I have finished listening to it for the first time. This is kind of common among guitar players, nothing special. It is due to the repetitive nature of rock music, blues as well and I suppose if you play jazz the same thing happens. Play long enough and maybe study a bit of theory and it just kind of happens.
/mai earz r n ur muzix, violating ur ipz
So let's say I show a few people how to play some crappy song that I can play by ear. Maybe I even write down the chord changes so they don't forget. Am I violating someone's IP? The right of the publisher to make a profit on the music? If so I don't give a flying fuck, just curious.
Because these obstacles have, of course, stopped them from suing 12 year olds and grandmothers for alleged file sharing...
Clearly publishing the entire work and publishing an excerpt are not the same. You fail.
paintball
...colocate your severs out of the US. Very simple. Then tell them to go fuck them selfs.
Drag the country down to third world status, and the immigrants will quit jumping the fence. That's what you want, right? Because that's what you'll get. Pretty soon you won't be able to drink clean water from the tap because the patent/copyright holder will want exorbitant fees/royalties. I guess you could call that "leveling the playing field". How pitiful. Doesn't look like we'll have to wait 500 years to get those Big Ass Fries. Mmmm...Now I'm hungry.
What?
Here is the contact information for the lawyer who sent the notice. Let's all give him a call and let him know what we think:
p ?id=17
Ross J. Charap
Partner
rcharap@mosessinger.com
Direct Line: (212) 554-7829
Fax Number: (917) 206-4329
from:
http://mosessinger.com/attorneys/attorney_view.ph
The Music Publishers' Association, as its name suggests, has the purpose of protecting the music publishers, not the composers. So this (taking down all tabulature sites) is being done only to protect the publishers of sheet music, who apparently can't compete with the free distribution of tabs on the Internet.
Making a copy is making a copy, no matter which method is used. A piece of music is defined by the duration of the notes and the intervals between them. Any method that will let you record this information is, by definition, a copy of the music. In the case of guitar tablature, it's usually not the melody itself that's recorded, but a set of chords that will harmonize with the music. As such, it's a "derivative" work, and still subject to copyright.
If there is a market for selling music in the form of tablature encodings for guitar, I think it's perfectly fair that the composer (or whoever he sold his composition to) will be allowed to profit from it.
Think of it this way: what would you say if you wrote a book and a studio made a movie of it? If you can listen to a music and write a guitar tab from memory, then why can't someone read a book and write a film script from memory?
This has been happening for years no with other tab sites, but its a shame one of my tab sites that still carried tabs has finally buckled. The MPAA is just picking on individuals and trying to extort them for doing what they should of taken the initiative to do themselves (sound familiar?). The sad part is, a tab site with thousands of tabs cannot take the time to verify that every tab posted is wrong in some way, so they have to give in. I guess the question is, if someone read a poem that was recorded and sold only in audio form, and then someone was hired to listen to the poem and write down the lyrics and the way things are emphesized and then sell it for more than the cost of the audio version, and then someone also took the same audio form and wrote down the lyrics without the emphesis and gave it out for free (with errors), would that third individual be violating copyright?
Just for the record, I bought a book of Korn tabs for "take a look in the mirror" for $2. Its MSRP is $21.95, $5 more than the album's cost at release.
It seems like there's a pretty significant demand for tabs (especially accurate ones), and a lack of desire to spent $30 for a book of tabs when you really only want one song. So why not an Itunes style service where you can buy whatever song tab you want for a resonable fee, all licensed through whatever agency/association claims the rights. The song writer/copyright holder gets a cut and the customer gets a quality product. Is there anything like this out there?
Now all the kiddies might actually have to learn to read music or identify pitch.
First. Guitar tabs is hosting individual interpretations of the songs. How accurate they are is up for discussion(there's usually 2,3,4 different published ways to play it.) Unless they are actually copying, note for note, from the artists published music transcriptions, I don't see a problem with this. This is absolutely ridiculous. Guitartabs has to stand up on this one. Watch what happens if it becomes illegal to transcribe music into tabs. Next your local cover band wont be able to play a cover song of your favorite band, without having to pay the artist because other people are listening to it. These cover bands exist, because they love the artist, and they are out there promoting the artist for free, because they love it, and others listen to it. Wouldn't you be flattered if everyone wanted to play your song? Would you demand these people stop playing your song, because you're not getting paid when they play it? Or your local music store, guitar instructor, wont be able to show you how to play a song, because you have to hire the artist to teach you how to play it, and then pay him an additional fee for actually playing it in front of other people. Then it will be illegal to play music in your own house, without a "RIAA" representative present to monitor your musical talents. The band didn't invent the A,C,D,E chord. They didn't find a new way of strumming it. They played a rythm or a beat that's been played 1000000 times over, threw in an extra instrument or background track, and added their lyrics to it. Sure that's an oversimplification, but really break it down. Are you honestly telling me I can't sit in front of my stereo and write down the notes to a song and say, hey Jim(my buddy) I figured it out, here I wrote it down. I see us 50 years from now with our electronic debit cards hooked up to the radio, and we're paying $5 a song, just to listen to it on the radio.
e
b
g
d 2 0 4 0 2
a 2 2 2
e 0 3 4
The more of these online music sites that go down, the harder it becomes for Timbaland to 'compose' more music!
The tabs should have been encrypted. Then the RIAA would be on the hook for hacking the encryption to find out that there was in fact tabs in there. Apparently, even Rot13 would have been good enough. ROT13 > RIAA
I'm assuming that this was simply mis-transcribed, since the site owner specifically mentions that he didn't have time to scan the letter. If it's not, then the irony has definitely been turned up to eleven.
One thing that a lot of people are overlooking is that a great deal of music is never published; I can't go out and buy the sheet music for King Crimson's Fracture because it hasn't been published. Nor can I get the complete score for Tubular Bells or Gates of Delirium. I have to look for tabs or work out the stuff myself, which I also do but don't really have the time for anymore.
If I can buy the music for the stuff I like and want, I typically do provided it's a good transcription and it's not just one song out of a $30 book.
But much of what I'm interested in is not available. So I turn to the online tab sites. And, if I can find GuitarPro files, all the better.
-X
all those thousands of wrong tabs on any of those tab sites - do they claim any of them as well?
Methinks they should...
They are going to introduce legislation to prevent people with perfect pitch from listening to music.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
I understand that being inventive gives me ownership on what I create - that's reasonable.
...I dislike the idea of a world where my children risk a lawsuit for copying DaVincis MonaLisa, when
Intellectual property of music should in my eyes be limited to the completely mastered song,
because this is the only point where you are at the end of the creational process and have a "product".
Music usually follows rules itself. Software like "Band-in-Box" (if I remember correctly)
can create unique music following these rules.
Does my computer refringe copyright, when it creates the melody of a known song ?
Protecting musicians from others copying their work is ok, but come on... draw a line where it is sane.
they do paintings for school after visiting an exhibition !
Here's an example of how generic chord sequences are and how the same chords show up repeatedly in different music. If tabs (chord sequences) are protected under copyright, then story plots are copyrightable, the function of software code (not the exact implementation itself) is copyrightable, the compositional style of a photograph (e.g. upper torso portrait with 3/4 lighting) is copyrightable. You're talking about a massive unprecedented expansion of the definition of what is copyrightable. An expansion that pretty obviously would shut down the cultural exchange of ideas as we know it.
This analogy is flawed anyway. In a book review you are using notation (words)to describe words. Tab is using notation to visually describe a piece of work that is experienced audibly. If I were to describe a book perfectly I would essentially re-write the entire book, or at least an abridgement of it. There is no way to describe a piece of music perfectly using musical notation, tablature or some new method of writing. It still needs to be translated by a musician or band (I.E. mentally). And then they need to perform the piece so that it is presented audibly. I know this sounds obvious, but by comparing book reviews to tabs it seems that some are missing the difference.
As someone that manages a guitar store, I feel comfortable telling you most(all) tab books are overpriced garbage. Just because Hal Lenord is in the bisuness doesn't mean they know a damn thing about it.
What about cover bands who get paid to play others' music? If I already know how to play a song, am I allowed to play it even if no one else hears it? What if I hum a tune? What if I think about a song in my head?
...reviews contain excerpts not the entire work
Excerpts are not protected. Portions of works are just as protected the same as whole works. No book review or movie reviews or any other review can ever be legal without express permission.
Substantial similarity is the name of the standard used to determine if one work is a copy of another: if the sounds that result when the tab is played are substantially similar to the sounds of the original song, the tab will be found to be substantially similar to the composition of the original song. This must be evaluated case-by-case. Substantially similarity can be found even when the songs sound very different.
Those comparing this to movie reviews miss the point - the proper comparison is to someone who transcribes all the lines for one character in a movie. This would be a copy of the script.
Further, it is the manifest intent of the tab transcribers to make a sound as similar to the original as possible. In fact, the tab sites rates on accuracy - higher scores give to those that are more similar. This will be weighed against the transcribers. If the tabs include the lyrics, the case will be even easier to make, assuming they're at all close (not a "There's a bathroom on the right" kind of thing).
Finally, even if substantial similarity isn't found, it's likely that the tab will be seen to be a derivative work of the original - also a copyright violation absent fair use. And intent to reproduce exactly is likely to hurt a parody defense here.
Fair use would probably protect someone who transcribes for their own use for private performances. Publishing on the web is likely not going to survive fair use analysis.
No one can honestly say "this is definitely a copyright violation." But if I only got paid if I won, I wouldn't be taking the guitar tab site's side in this one.
Repeat after me:
- Copyright protects specific implementations, not ideas.
- Patents protect specific ideas, not implementations, and those ideas are PUBLISHED, openly.
Consequently, you are making ZERO sense when you say that reverse engineering comes into play for patents. There is nothing to reverse engineer --- the patented ideas are revealed openly, as a mandatory part of the patenting process.
It should be pretty obvious from the above that reverse engineering can only ever apply to specific implementations, and those must necessarily be closed-source otherwise you can read the code directly rather than have to reverse engineer it.
So, is reverse engineering relevant to music? Well lawyers will of course argue about it until the cows come home, because they profit from uncertainty and conflict. But from a technical standpoint, figuring out the notes of a song is no different conceptually to figuring out how a program works from its binary executable alone.
Logically then, yes, reverse engineering is highly applicable to music.
However, whether you can convince the moronic judges, lawyers and politicians who make the laws which cover that is extremely doubtful, as logic is not their strong point and it is in conflict with the lucrative "support" they get from the music industry lobbiests.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
I wrote a letter to the press inquiry address of my favorite band, The Killers:
I'm a hobbyist musician (I play at home, alone) trying to learn and
improve myself at guitar. You may be aware of the events of the last
year or so where most of the guitar tablature sites are being shut down
due to supposed copyright infringement. My thoughts on what a tablature
really is versus what sheet music really is are perhaps outside the
scope of my letter to you. I have purchased a license to listen
('purchased' a physical CD of) every album the Killers has released as
well as some singles and remixes on iTunes, and my wifes sister at one
point dated the bassist- so we love the Killers all the more. Long story
short, regardless of what I think of tablature's supposed risk to your
income, I'm more than happy to pay for the ability to play the killers
songs at home, in private, and remove my eardrums if I must (in order to
prevent my brain from inadvertently recording the song) if the band or
its copyright holders were willing to make the tablature (not even
asking for sheet music) available for a price. Similarly, many groups no
longer even print their lyrics in the CD booklets and often I spend
years wondering what the heck the real meaning of the song is- every
once in a while someone says what they think a word or phase was and
it's like a lightbulb going off 'ohhh, so they weren't singing about
killing the granny, they were talking about winning at the Grammies!'.
The two Killers albums I checked don't have lyrics, though I can just
about sing along to all of the songs (in my car, alone, with no
recording devices, with no written lyrics). The point of all this is,
I'd be happy to pay for my right to further my enjoyment of the Killers
songs (which I've already 'paid' for, you've got my buck, sometimes more
than once). I urge the Killers to set up a way to have access to the
lyrics and tablature, even if for a price. Ultimately, I believe the
information should be included with the 'purchase' of the CDs, but just
having the information available officially would be a step in the right
direction for music lovers everywhere. Please, let me love the Killers
even more.
Thank you for your time.
Seriously, are any of you musicians here? Played in a rock band at school or college? You need to be there to know how much passion, time and effort goes in to figuring out the right chords, phrasing, intonation and solos. From my experience, public tab sharing has mostly been a way for amateur musicians to quickly learn the song they love and would love to play.
The way I see it is that this is a body blow for amateur musicians and those who jam on weekends for fun. This has nothing to do with intellectual property, large scale piracy, or file sharing on the net.
The MPAA/RIAA/NMPA are doing this because "they hate our freedoms"!
I never thought this little story would ever be useful to me...
In Rome, there used to be a celebrated 9 part piece called Miserere, which could only be heard in Rome during Holy Week. By papal decree, it was forbidden to sing the song elsewhere, or at any other time. The only existing copy was held by the papal choir, and guarded heavily. It was even forbidden to sing or whistle it outside of Rome.
Anyway, when Mozart was 14, he travelled to Rome to attend a performance of this piece. When he returned to his lodgings that day, after only hearing it once, he reproduced the entire thing on paper. It is said he attended again a few days later to fix any errors he may have had. And in this way, Mozart stole the Miserere from the Vatican and gave it to the world.
Eventually, word spread, and the Pope learned of Mozart's feat. However, instead of punishing Mozart, the Pope praised him, and gave him gifts. He even bestowed upon him the Cross of the Order of the Golden Spur.
Why does everyone else get punished for trying to spread music to the world?
check out this post from when this was originally discussed and my little conspiracy theory in reply.
Might be time for an IP bill of rights?
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
chug-chug-chug, chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga
Mongrel News all the news that fits and froths
Did they just provide the harmony, or did they also give the melody?
I remember in my music classes, particularly jazz, that melody's ARE copyright. However, harmonies are NOT. There are at least 100 songs based on the chord progressions used by George Gershwin in I've Got Rhythm. We had to memorize it because in jams, the musicians will just say "Rhythm Changes in " There are an untold number of songs based on the Blues progression.
Is this group trying to say Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., and who knows who else were vicious breakers of copyright?
Reminds me of the time Mozart owned the Vatican by memorizing their super secret song and writing it down later.
You have to wonder what would've happened if they had had international lawsuits back then.
Here's an even better idea! Sell song-books with license packages on the per-listener basis. I suppose it's truly unfair to recording industry if one shamelessly started a guitar accompanied performance with all those damn music pirates gathered around the campfire.
'Swans sing before they die..'Twere no bad thing,
Should certain persons die before they sing...
A Pope.
Anyone here ever heard of the Real Book? It's a fake book of jazz standards that has been around for decades. For fear of copyright, it was semi-illegal (definitely unauthorized) and was passed around from person to person (via xerox machine) for most of that time rather than being published. Because you could not buy it in stores anywhere and because it was hard to get, being given a copy was sort of a rite of passage for jazz players -- somebody thinks you're worth bothering with if they help you get a copy of it. This was before the days of the internet, of course.
As a disclaimer, although I play a little bit of music, I am definitely not worthy of being called a jazz musician, and nobody has offered me a copy of the Real Book. Well, one person did, but only because he had it on CD-ROM and it wasn't hard to do, which is not nearly the same thing as really being offered it once was.
Maybe where you live a book of tablature is cheap, but in all the music store where I live the tablature book for any given album typically costs more than the album itself and by a fair margin.
I cannot *imagine* the mental contortions required to believe that black is white. Have you ever actually seen a copy of Cliff's Notes and compared it to the original novel? Cliff's Notes contain excerpts. If tablatures were like Cliff's notes, they'd contain the first nine notes of the opening riff, the midle of the first and third verses, the first and last bar of the refrain, and the next-to-the-last bar of the final verse.
But tablatures aren't like that are they?
Instead, tablatures are a complete set of instructions intended by design to allow the user to construct a complete and recognizeable performance of the original song. Whether or not they are strictly correct is irrelevant. If anything, producing a tablature of somebody else's work is much more akin (though not precisely) to taking a camcorder into a movie theatre to record the movie. It may be good, it may be crap, it may contain hecklers and a crying baby that was in the theatre - but it produces something that is recognizably a copy of the movie.
A web site allows anonimous upload of a track, and returns a computed tablature for this track. Is chord computing illegal in the USA?
That's simply foolish, please someone set up such a web site to show how ridiculous is to forbid musical notations.
What's in a sig?
Here's a test: put a piece of tableture in front of a piano player who can sight-read music. Can they reproduce the music on the piano by reading the tableture? Didn't think so. Why? Because THERE IS NO MUSICAL INFORMATION IN TABLETURE! Tableture defined as a "transcription of music" really stretches the defintion of transcription. Tableture does not convey actual pitches of notes. It is simply "put your finger here, then there". Unless the recording I used as reference had a voice saying "G string, fifth fret, now do B string, first fret", no 'transcription of music' is taking place with tableture By contrast, when you 'transcribe' a piece of music, you are reproducing *in standard musical notation*, the pitches of the notes and their associated rythmic values of a piece of music. Transcribed properly, you end up with sheet music that any sight- reading musician can reproduce via voice or instrument. If I were to distribute such a transcription, yes I may be infringing. (which is another point: if I transcribe Stairway To heaven incorrectly, then share my transcription, did I infringe?).
Next thing you know, there will be spawning out idiots & morons who will be copyrighting natural sounds found in the nature and then demanding that they should be paid for those. You people have to stop this madness.
Read radical news here
This news is so old. The site posted this letter and there were articles written about it, etc. almost a year ago. In the time since, a lot of other sites have also shut down. MXTabs.net also shut down last summer due to the same reason - it has since been purchased, and is being relaunched this summer as a legal alternative. Anyway, I was shocked to see Slashdot featuring a story that's a year old. Next thing we know there will be an announcement that the US is going to war with Iraq.
Why do the "authorized" publishers of the guitar tab feel they *must* shut down the other sites before they can be successful with a new venture, publishing them online themselves?
For starters, a lot of tab out there is really poor. Very inaccurate, or only partial tabs - made by some kid who wanted to share the fact that he "finally figured out the guitar chords for the first chorus" or what-not. If I can choose between one of these "unofficial" tab collection sites, or a real, "authorized" one that's still free to use (ad-supported), guess which one I'll pick?
But pissing off all the practicing/budding musicians who are currently trying to learn using whatever they can get, from sites like guitartabs.com, doesn't make any sense. "Hey, come use us now! We're the ones that forced legal shutdowns of all the sites you knew and loved before, so you KNOW we're a friendly, helpful bunch!"
Google is also ad supported right?
A very large number of tabs come from the newsgroup alt.guitar.tab. Which is very well archived at groups.google.com.
Wow, talk about perfect timing. I just bought my first guitar on Saturday (one from fretlight.com, a friend recommended it) and was basically going to rely on guitar tablature online since I haven't developed "an ear" for music quite yet. We live in a free/democratic society where technically information should be available like crazy, but this is an example of one of the drawbacks of capitalism. Capitalism inspires greed, and this is a prime example.
He then proceeds to order an Aristotle of the most ping-pong tiddly in the nuclear sub.
From the copyright statement at the bottom of the page with the letter:
©2005 GuitarTabs.com and Peter Allen. All rights reserved.
No portion of this page may be modified, duplicated or distributed without the express consent of Allen Enterprises, Inc. Use of this site is governed by our Terms of Service agreement. Anyone who does not accept our Terms of Service is prohibited from accessing our site and must leave immediately.
Copyright is only wrong when it is someone elses...
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
for instance, you can publish the tabs of "louie louie" because they are a pretty generic chord sequence that probably occur in many songs. However, the instant you slap the "louie louie" title on it, you are now infringing the copyright.
Examples of the compositions infringed include "Beautiful Day" written by Clayton/Evans/Mullen/Hewson and administered by Universal Music Publishing, and "I Want To Hold Your Hand" written by Lennon/McCarthy and administered by Sony/ATV Tunes LLC.
What a beautiful one! That's how you know witch hunt is not over yet...
É que os desafinados também têm um coração
Guitar tabs are not music in the same way that sketches are not paintings.
Music is a combination of notes and timings. Most internet based tabs do not include the timings. They only tell the player which notes on which strings are to be played. And truth be told, they don't always do this very faithfully. It's up to the player to use his or her knowledge of the piece to inject the rhythms, inflection, and other subtleties to reconstruct the music.
In short, internet guitar tabs are partial frameworks and guides, not faithful representations of the music that is being supposedly infringed upon.
That's right. Guitartabs.com is clearly publishing things it has no right to. As sucky as it may be, these are pretty poor fair use cases. To wit:
1) They typically publish the entire guitar part, not just chord progressions or a portion of the entire song. (Fair use would generally require a portion)
2) Users of tabs might be using them for "study" but Guitartabs.com certainly isn't, and that's who's being sued. They're making other people's IP available for free and getting paid with advertising.
3) There's a huge market for guitar tabs (via songbooks) that are properly licensed via publishing deals between artists, their publishing companies, and agents like Hal Leonard. Guitartabs.com is circumventing that and claims of Fair Use generally need to respect (or at least not threaten significantly) existing markets.
This isn't to stop anyone from making their own transcriptions -- just don't build a web site and make money from it unless you've got permission.
Since the classic 'Happy Birthday' in still under copyright, I use a version that has "We Wish You a Merry Christmas" as the tune. Since this dates back to sixteenth century England, it should be in the public domain.
The lyrics that I use go as follows:
"We wish you a happy birthday. We wish you a happy birthday. We wish you a happy birthday, and many, many more."
Note that any attempt at trying to copyright these lyrics will have to contend with the fact that they are posted in a public forum.
What if I whistle it off tune, in a different key, and mix it up with other music?
For example, if I mix the "Imperial Theme" from Star Wars with "A spoon full of sugar" from Mary Poppins? And then I drop some of the notes when whistling.
It would be interesting if someone went through ALL the music that has been published and extracted fragments that can be found in multiple areas and then shifted those fragments so they are in different keys. There would likely be a lot of current music that would be violating older copyrights.
I seem to recall a Robert Heinlein story that touched on the topic of copyrights, creativity and what could happen if copyrights were extended for absurb amounts of time.
I looked through the comments and didn't see a mention of this excerpt from the letter from the lawyer so here it is: blah blah blah, you're stealing, blah blah blah, "I Want To Hold Your Hand" written by Lennon/McCarthy and administered by Sony/ATV Tunes LLC. Just another example of the inmates running the asylum. Who doesn't know who Lennon/McCartney is and wouldn't know enough not to typo Paul's last name in a legal document "protecting" him? It's pathetic, funny and sad all at the same time.
Sorry to all of the metal and hardcore bands out there. The MAFIAA has been granted a patent for the Em chord and drop-D tuning. All your songs are belong to us.
That they can't reply "Go To Hell" and leave it at that.
Nice try but poor analogy. Most copyrighted digital content can be transcoded which involves lossy / corruptive conversion from the original. Using a shitty handycam to copy a release in the cinema is also considered a copyright violation though it deviates significantly in quality and detail to the original. I don't see how listening to music and writing down the notes is essentially different. It is just a lossy encoding of the artists original ideas.
The bikini - security through obscurity since 1943
Another example of an outmoded business model using the last means at its disposal (lawyers) to try with white knuckles clinched to hold onto customers while at the same time stabbing them in the back. The pattern is very predictable.
When an an established industry is disrupted by technology and no longer has any intellectual property to enable their business, they call in the lawyers and try, by manipulation of law, to force society to continue to support their outmoded business model.
The traditional distribution of recorded music will continue for some years, but they will not control the channels like they used to and as a result, revenues will decrease and some of these old farts who have been riding on the shoulders of the musicians that paid their way will have to find other work.
FutureExpressionist