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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.
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.
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!
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.
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".
""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 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.
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.
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
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.
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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
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.
...colocate your severs out of the US. Very simple. Then tell them to go fuck them selfs.
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.
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?
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!"