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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.
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?
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.
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.
Shall we outlaw whistling next?
I don't care why you're posting AC
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.
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.
That appears more like reverse engineering to me, which IS legal.
/.ish, decompiling the source code of a compiled program. Doing it doesn't free you from copyright.
In and of itself, for an in-house project? Sure. If it's patented it needs to be in the patent description, so fuddling around to better understand that patent (so you can use it the day it expires) is fine. If it's just copyritten, the ideas therein aren't protected.
But by and large, writing down the fingerings of a song isn't going after ideas -- it's going after the specific collection of them. It's like, as I say elsewhere, writing down the script of a play. Or to be
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 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.
I'm not sure how that is relevant. Reviews contain excerpts not the entire work, and guitartabs was publishing neither reviews nor parodies. It essentially publishes a form of sheet music.
Never mind that, but half of the music I would want to learn how to play is not and has never been released in tablature form. I've never seen an Iced Earth tab book; the only way I've been able to learn how to play is to find tabs online. And, even those blasted tab books have errors in them, so they know when they're transcribed and uploaded to the net. So you're paying for a tablature that's not even correct. It's insane.
Napalm is nature's toothpaste
That site may very well be a commercial enterprise. Other sites were communities of music lovers, who learned from and shared with each other. I have no doubt we are depriving some deserving collection of investors and speculators of their income by giving away our derivative works for free, just as I am no doubt stealing from someone by simply teaching my neice how to play the intro to Purple Haze.
So to expand on my last post, be careful what you whistle. Some day soon, someone may come along and tell you that you that you owe them a royalty for that performance of their intellectual property.
I don't care why you're posting AC
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.
The brain is identifying the tonal root, rhythm, chords, and the relations between chords. Is this illegal also? Is it illegal to tell your band buddy: Hey did you hear that? That was an awesome change to the parallel key when they went from the A to the C chord? Silly stuff.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
I am in a band and Guitar Pro 4/5 has always proved invaluable to us. Back when www.mysongbook.com allowed you to actually download all their tabs, it was easy to find a good, high quality tab for whatever song we were covering. All of our compositions are also made in Guitar Pro and spread to each of the band members - both for the ability of being able to listen to a theoretical version of the song, and being able to convey our ideas to the other members better.
This was in no way making us money, or losing any money for the record companies. We weren't choosing to listen to Midis over buying CDs or anything like that. Oh sure, you can argue maybe we were abstaining from buying sheet music over using the tabs, but at the same time - most of what we played did not have sheet music transcriptions for all instruments.
And being able to have your song in tab notation, sheet music notation and have it playable as a Midi (for all instruments) is a lot more useful than just having the sheet music for one instrument in a book.
With mysongbook.com down, not only are tabs a lot harder to find, but it's harder to find the higher quality ones, or ones that include all instruments (instead of just guitars+bass).
This is nothing but greed - record companies trying to work out if they can make money off tabs...and until they can work that out, banning any other distributions all together.
~Jarik
That's a somewhat bad analogy. The Mona Lisa painting is in the public domain, so you can copy it and basically do whatever you want with your copy.
Imagine going to an artist's gallery, and you see a well-done drawing and decide to sit there and draw it yourself. The artist would probably yell at you, and the legality of copying it like that is probably in a sort of grey-area, depending on how you intend to use it. However, you can't go and make copies then go selling them to people or places... He solely has copyright on the work and chooses how and where to distribute it. You have no right to sell copies of his drawing.
But say you wrote notes on where he drew certain lines and how he used shading for an interesting effect, and interpreted what sort of style he was going for. Basically you're writing a review of the work. To me that's what guitar tabs are. Sort of like reverse engineering, but it's mostly like a guideline of what the music sounds like.
I'm guessing that to have a situation like the one in the gallery, you would have to break into an artist's house and copy his personal tabs or sheet music that he wrote for the music, then distribute copies of that. It's very different that listening to a song and guessing how it's played.
I can't see at all how guitar tabs infringe on copyrights, lessen the value of the music, or prevent the sales of albums. And those would seem to be the only reasons for taking them down, to me at least.
No existe.
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!"
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.