http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4508158.stm

This isnt fair

p.s quality 3000th post :D :arrg:

This is beyond fucking ridiculous!! Seriously, this almost motivates me to get active against these bastards. Let's crush the recording industry!

Well they do have a point. Lyrics are copyrighted so people shouldn't be putting them on the web without permission much less charging for them to make a profit.

This does bring up a few points though, if you've bought the music should this automatically entitle you to the lyrics and music sheets? One can argue that you can figure these things out on the music alone (the lyrics certainly, the music if you're a talented musician) and if you want them faster, easier and more accurate then you should have to pay for them. After all if you have to buy them in dead tree format, why should you get them for free online?

Synopsis, I believe you may be incorrect. My understanding is that copyright law does not cover usage that is intended for research, non-profit usages in this instance.

I'm just happy that all my favourite forms of p2p (Bit Torrent, DC++) are way too decentralised to ever be killed.

That doesn't apply here. People are either taking or reproducing someone elses copyrighted work - and lyrics are certainly copyrighted you can be sure of that - and then posting it on the web, in some case to make a profit, all without permission from the copyright holders. This is against the law.

You can certainly take excerpts and snippets for public use, for research and commenting and parodies, but reproducing the whole work is expressly forbidden.

Well, I think it's ridiculous to so fervently pursue copyright law over something that should be a public resource. It is not stealing work, it is reproducing lyrics so that people can understand the lyrics of a song or sing along.

Should singing along to an entire song, i.e. reproducing a whole work in full, be illegal?

oh fuck you MPA

theyre going to sue tab and lyric hosting sites now too?

just... wtf

The trick is to simply have the lyrics, but with every letter 'e' replaced by the '#' sign. Then people on the net simply need to take those lyrics and use MS word to replace the #'s with e's.

Hmm, I wonder if that legal loophole would work...

The fuckhead lawyers would find some way to exploit it, but that is a good idea nevertheless Oob. Perhaps we could own them by a technicality like that.

I think "the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;" and "the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work." might come in to play to make that legal. I'm not sure as I'm not a copyright lawyer.

Technology > legal system

US Patent Office > Technology *sighs*

Oh yeah, crap.

Ah, the American Right, gotta love them.

But, seriously. I see both sides here. People have to make a living out of music, and the internet is taking this away from them. So if you pay, people survive in a way that suits all of us.
If you carry it on, people won't survive as musicians. Which will suck. Keep culture alive and all that.

While I was writing, I thought that music should be a hobby rather than a job if you enjoy it (please dont challenge this, i was heavily into music for 8 years or so, it was my life dream, and now look), so people will probably want to share their shit on the net. But artists and what not, I don't know.


Also such a law will be difficult to impose if it gets passed. Will it apply to american websites only? And how the fuck will they block foreign websites on american ISPs? Only through censorship....and then they become LIKE CHINA!!!! agh!

I can see a plus side to that, my eyes and ears won't be assailed with the bullshit which passes for music these days, and only people who care about the music enough to create it for free (or not even for free since they'll still have concerts/merchandise/paypal donations/etc.) will create music.

Apparently what generally happens is that peer to peer becomes a good thing for 'poor unknown musicians' because it gets their name out, and it's only a bad thing for the musicians with barrels of cash anyway.

I think iTunes goes a long way to providing a better solution for selling music. You pick the tracks you like, so you don't waste money on crap, and the overheads for the musician are lower.

Interestingly, some of the recording studios have complained that the drop in CD sales isn't reflected by a similar increase in legit 'net sales. I suspect that this is because people are paying only for the tracks they like rather than an entire album.

MrT, I think that the RIAs of each country need to come to grips with the fact that they can't impose restrictions on a free market for music. iTunes is their delayed, poor reaction that proves that user pays in music is going to rot and die. They need to learn to roll with it, adapt, yi ching, etc.

Copyright law is a capitalist fraud.

I dunno, if I program something and someone rips off my code and sells what I made, I'd be pretty cheesed.

Oh wait, that's a patent. Someone explain the difference again please.

But copyright law allows people to own words. Did you know that a gamer held the domain www.sting.com, and Sting (the shitty musician) sued him under US legal jurisdiction, and won?

Or that a beer called West, due to copyright law in the European Union, means that we can no longer hear the beautiful tones of Westlife on the continent?

Patents recognise that someone invented an idea, but copyrights 'privatise' everything. Within reason, it's excellent and a great idea, but once you get to a certain point and allow copyrighting of actual language, it is terrifying.

A case in point: would you find it unethical if a medicine company developed a vaccine for AIDS, yet copyrighted the vaccine and refused to allow it to be distributed without a very large premium for themselves?

One could argue that copyright law provided the incentive for this development, but that's a straw man argument.

Yeah, there's a certain balance that needs to be met between incentivizing innovation and free use of said innovation. While I'd like to see copyright law changed, I don't think I'd want it to be done away with completely.

iTunes is actually proving the opposite, that if people can get what they want quickly and easily then they are perfectly willing to pay for it.
This is a key concept that every conman knows: Make it easy for people to give you their money, and it will come rolling in.

P2P also has a few limitations: Each one tends towards a particular media, Bittorrent for example leans towards games and video. Items can be hard to find, especially if they aren't popular, Bittorrent again is a perfect example of this. They have a limited lifespan as the labels work out how to shut them out of illegal downloads, so you have to keep switching between new applications.

The main problem with iTunes is that Apple has to make deals with each countries labels and publishers before they can offer the iTMS there, but that's not really Apples fault, it's the way the law is set up and they have to work within those restrictions.

the RIAA has won a court case against some lady who downloaded 30 tracks from an unspecified p2p network. She had to pay them US$22,500 ($750 per track)

they're chasing the little guys now ?!?


http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/7152.cfm

Which is why we should never respect the MPA/RIA's of the world.

I'd heard it was their policy to pursue a number of token 'small guys' and take them to court, in an effort to keep the rest in line (decimation style).

Like on that movie, with Ryan Phillipe and Tim Robbins?

Yeah I wrote an essay about this kind of stuff for my third year "Law and Economics" paper. If anyone wants a copy, let me know. But I agree with the general sentiment of you chaps. Lyrics I do think should be available for songs where the lyrics aren't available on, say, an album sleeve. Tabs do very little damage to anyone. For non-musicians, these are essentially transcripts of how to play a song on guitar. Most tabs contain errors or are incomplete; it is a given that this will occur, since they are almost always made by the transcriber copying them by ear. I can say with absolute confidence that most musicians would be delighted to have other people learn to play their songs. That's how a lot of us learn to play guitar. Self included. Most musicians do not sell sheet music to their songs. Tabbing has admittedly helped to kill that off, but I consider that to be progress. The heyday of sheet music is gone. It was most popular back when the piano was the main instrument, and there was only a brief period in the 60s and 70s where sale of sheet music contributed substantially to artists' incomes. And of course, only major artists ever had sheet music.

Not to restate my 5000 word essay, but essentially in economics a lot of the downloading stems from low willingness to pay; that is, were downloading not possible, the people wouldn't have bought the music anyway. Since it is possible, the consumers benefit and the record industry doesn't lose anything. A proportion of it is harmful, however.

If a fucktard like the Game can make millions, the record industry has to be doing pretty well regardless.

However, I haven't bought a cd in like 6 months, where as I used to buy them monthly before I had a computer, so I can understand that they're pissed. I download constantly, there's no way i'd buy 90% of the songs i'd download so the loss isn't as huge as they make it out to be.

Believe in Jesus? We'll pay you $75 right now to complete a simple survey!

Guess i'm off to powertab to download a few thousand tabs before they get taken down.

Too late man