Free the Lyrics

Brent D. Payne, CEO/Founder of Lyric Vault, posted February 2, 2006 to a newsgroup in response to a question about how lyrics sites usually populate their databases. In his explanation he also talked about the lyrics sites crackdown, and reminded people that even though the MPA had made threats, no one has been sued yet.

The part that interests me is where he says that he’s had some luck in communicating with music publishers.

The good news though is that the publishers are co-operative with any the smallest of web sites such as http://www.lyricvault.com and if you have the right attitude a call to most of the major publishers will gain you a great response.

Also of interest to me is where Payne wrote:

I recently had an article published by the press that got the attention of a lot of the music publishers

Is this the one he’s talking about? Don’t Sue Me, Just Pick Up The Phone by Jason Lee Miller, published 2005-12-22. It has quotes from Payne, so maybe that’s the one he meant.

Who is most affected by illegal lyrics and tab sites? The songwriters? I doubt it. The publishing companies? Not in the general sense of the term “publisher” which is all about the administration of copyrights, not just print rights. Specifically, I think the niche of print music publishing is getting hurt by the internet. Some agencies that specialize in printed music include Hal Leonard, Cherry Lane Music Group, and Music Sales Group.

Does anyone report the revenue generated through sheet music sales? I know it’s not a significant portion of the overall music industry, but obviously it’s being affected even more than usual. The MPA’s threats (December 2005) imply a bit of desperation. I find it hard to believe they are just now feeling the effects of the internet. Lyrics and tab sites have been around for over a decade, and there have been efforts to shut them down before, but nothing that put a dent in all the unauthorized sites out there.

Even though publishers modernized their operations a little bit by offering digital sheet music sales, the cat is out of the bag with lyrics and tab sites. Is the publishing industry ready to participate in this new paradigm? There are already companies trying to make lyrics licensing a reality.

But what about tablature? It’s here that things get a bit difficult, from both the industry’s perspective and the tab transcriber perspective.

Industry: Anything that diminishes the relevancy of print music publishers is likely to be met with a bit of resistance, so tab sites aren’t exactly going to have an easy time licensing content.

Tab writers: It’s their opinion that tab sites are comprised of fan interpretations of songs, so what they’re doing isn’t a breach of copyright, especially if the site doesn’t make any money. That’s open to debate, but the bottom line is that you have print publishers that don’t want to license the content for fear of losing sheet music business, and you have tab writers who don’t think they need to license the content anyway. What you end up with is a situation where the content won’t be licensed, and you have tab sites are shutting down, or continue to run with the fear of being faced with legal repercussions.

Looks like a lose/lose situation.

I was wondering when someone would submit TabAid.com to digg. Looks like someone did.

With a community as united as the digg.com community, if we all sign the petition and support this one unified direction of counter attack, we can at least organize a voice! There’s also a petition which takes about 2 seconds to sign up for. Looks like its well organized and exactly what we need.

read more | digg story

SongMeanings.net, in their Copyright Issues page, excerpts U.S. copyright law to make the following claim:

This basically states, that if SongMeanings remains public, stays free, keeps displaying the copyright notice on every page, and doesn’t claim ownership to any of the copyrighted material, it may remain archiving and displaying copyright lyrics.