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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.
Well, it's usually more the composer's copyright that is claimed to be violated.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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
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
Maybe. If you do it for cash, yes. Tab sites are commercial enterprises (note the banner ads). See this: http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Moderators: this is an on-topic reference to Wayne's World, where one of the two of them picks up a guitar in the shop and starts playing the famous PbZ song.
Store worker yanks the guitar from (Wayne, IIRC?), points to a sign posted that says "No Stairway", at which point Wayne and Garth look at each other and say "Denied".
They would have gotten away with it, too, if not for the meddling employee!
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
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".
It is bleedingly obvious that tablature is made and distributed for scholarship. In fact, I was attempting to teach my self how to play bass guitar. I got relatively good at it until the tab sites started shutting down. Now I haven't practiced in months.
The sheet music publishers need to get over themselves. People who want to casually learn to play an instrument aren't going to go and pay hundreds of dollars for lessons and buy the sheet music of their favorite artists.
The really sad thing is that these lawsuits are killing what copyright was designed to protect, promotion of the arts.
Meh. That's for a court to decide.. which I'm pretty sure they have, and ruled in favor of the tabers, but I can't really back that up with the exact case, etc. Maybe someone can help me out. That's really not the point. The point is that it will cost these people a whole lot of money to stop you if you fight them.. and so long as you're not, oh, say, Google or Microsoft or someone, then it simply isn't in their interest.
How we know is more important than what we know.
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
People have been selling "fake books" for decades. http://www.sheetmusic1.com/fakebook.ultimate.html With all the tools to make something very similar to the copywrighted songs. If I make a painting that looks very similar to the Mona Lisa, I can't sell it? It's not like I'm claiming that it is The Mona Lisa, it's just something similar. http://www.nextag.com/mona-lisa-painting/search-ht ml
Publishing the transcription, in effect republishing the original artist's work, is the issue.
It's just as argueably a publishing of what I hear when I listen to "the original work". A conveyence of my own personal experiences.
We are all just people.
Yes, they can. What they lose if they do that is the DCMA's protection against a civil suit.
The notion that if you follow the anti-takedown notice rules, the ISP is *prohibited* from removing the material in question is a popular one, but it's flat-out wrong:
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.
It's like, as I say elsewhere, writing down the script of a play. Or to be /.ish, decompiling the source code of a compiled program.
No, I don't buy it. Writing down the script of the play would give you the exact script. However, a song is a human interpretation of written music, much like a binary is a computer translation of source code. The difference is that humans do not perform exactly what is written, while computers do. Further, other humans attempting to reverse-engineer the written music from the performance would also not transcribe the exact music as it was played. So, like the old game of "telephone" with one person whispering to another person, to yet another person, and then trying to figure out the original message, no transcription of a performance is going to get you the music as it was originally written. You would have a parody of the original written music - similar, but not quite exact.
parody (pr'-d) n., pl. -dies.
3. Music. The practice of reworking an already established composition, especially the incorporation into the Mass of material borrowed from other works, such as motets or madrigals.
And of course, parody is protected under copyright law.
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.
Why not buy the sheet music and tabs you want, or wait and use the tab/lyric sites operated by the publishers themselves?
Judging from your story about buying a Beatles song book for $10 bucks, I know that you really haven't grasped the issue at hand, and don't play much guitar.
Sheet music is mostly written for piano. It represents a sort of lowest common denominator transcription of the music, like Muzak for singalongs. Guitar "song books" are much the same, but have guitar chords added. You think either represents the music the way it was played in the original song? Not bloodly likely.
Almost all sheet music is wrong. They may get the key correct, and a few of the chords might be correct, but that's the extent of it. You can play, for example, an A minor chord in an almost infinite number of ways. The variables include the number of strings used, the fret position, whether a capo is used, whether a different tuning was used. Different guitarists play in different ways.
The fret position and fingering is usually enough to get you in the right neighborhood. That's what guitar tabs offer and what sheet music can't and doesn't offer. Granted, if we're talking about the Beatles (or Country and Western, folk songs, etc.) where most all songs are played in open position and use very simple strumming or picking, you might get away with the sheet music. That's hardly true for guitarists like Robert Fripp, U2's The Edge, Jimmy Page of yesteryear, or even someone whos entirely derivative like Brian Setzer.
Sheet music is copyrighted tablature. Guitar tabs are reverse engineering.