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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
As far as I can tell, if I transcribe a song into tab, it is my work, not theirs.
That doesn't make too much sense. I mean, if instead of photocopying an electronics schematic I manually draw a new one, with the original right there for reference, is that "my work"?
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?
While I agree with you on a very basic level, your example is not quite right. By-ear tabulature would be like making an electronics schematic by dissasembling the finished product that the schematics describe.
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.
...colocate your severs out of the US. Very simple. Then tell them to go fuck them selfs.
Not only that, but the first five notes of Stairway to Heaven were only played in the theatrical release. Due to the sorts of copyright rulings that drove guitartabs.com off the internet, the producers of Waynes World were forced to change the riff for all subsequent releases.
The ______ Agenda
By the time "Wayne's World" made it to Europe (2 weeks after its release in the U.S.), that scene had him play a single note. Even though that note starts off many rock songs, it was enough for the store employee to deny Wayne the pleasure.
I had so much sympathy for the guitar shop employee. Imagine every wanna-be rocker coming in to try to play Stairway, butchering it every single time. The whole idea of a single note being enough to identify the song was at the same time good for a laugh, and scary to think that American copyright law kept the film makers from using more than a one note before violating the law.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
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?
Actually, the specific example of transcription-by-ear is one of the reasons there was great pressure to develop international copyright law.
In the 19th Century, authors and producers of popular musical entertainment (such as, at the time, Gilbert & Sullivan) had to go to extraordinary lengths to prevent "entrepreneurial" productions of their works appearing on the American stage within weeks of the London production as a result of transcribers busily noting down the entire work in the audience - the Victorian equivalent of a "screener".
You can reasonably debate whether copyright is a "good thing" and how long it should last, but if there is to be copyright, then being able to transcribe by ear is just as much a copyright infringement as photocopying the sheet music.