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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.
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
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.
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
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:
I'm going to start with the usual IANAL.
Copyrights are weaker than patents in that they cover specifics rather than the abstract. However, copyright also has stronger rules about what is and isn't allowed with copyrighted works.
For instance, in the US it's illegal to create a derivative work of a copyrighted piece without permission of the copyright owner*. Not surprisingly, tabs and sheet music (objects created with the express purpose of allowing someone to recreate the original work), are covered by that rule. It may surprise you, but there are companies out there that produce tabs and sheet music for songs that have actually licensed the rights to do so. Not surprisingly, these companies are also not happy about people creating their own tabs/sheet music and (more importantly) distributing them over the Internet.
* Other provisions of Title 17 need to be taken into account, particularly Section 107 Fair Use. For example, a movie review only contains minute details about a movie's plot, so that is exempted from copyright law, as opposed to a (tran)script of the movie.
GLaDOS for President 2016! "Well here we are again. It's always such a pleasure." -- GLaDOS, 2011
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.