Free the Lyrics

The popular tab site mysongbook.com (the best resource for Guitar Pro tabs) can no longer distribute tabs. Here’s the drawn out explanation from the MPA. Remember kids, looking at guitar tabs is like stealing a guitar from a music store.

read more | digg story

This happened at least a few weeks ago, but I just read about it today.

Best I can tell MySongBook decided to take down their tabs as a precaution, not because they were sued or otherwise forced to. Here’s the message from mysongbook.com

Providing some tabs - even made by ear - of copyrighted music is illegal. In order to respect the law, downloads have been limited to the [Composition] and [Competition] files. We are going to make our best to find a solution to offer music content without infringing copyrights.

“Never heard of SIRA? That’s the way Big Copyright and their lackeys want it, and it’s bad news for you. Simply put, SIRA fundamentally redefines copyright and fair use in the digital world. It would require all incidental copies of music to be licensed separately from the originating copy.”

read more | digg story

The digg link goes to ipaction.org, and paints a grim picture of the proposed SIRA bill. While I agree it has potential for becoming a copyright nightmare, I need to know more about the bill before passing judgment. I can’t find the text of the actual proposed bill, but in the digg comments briguyd posted a link to the U.S. Copyright Office’s summary of the bill.

I read through their analysis, and it seems the bill has potential for being a good thing in streamlining the royalites paid for online downloads and streaming services. The parts about licensing incidental copies appears to have only to do with the stops en route to the consumer such as “server, cache and buffer copies”. Although depending on how the bill is worded, this could apply to any copy, including copies made from computer to iPod, etc.

Then again, the Copyright Office statement indicated that the bill would suggest royalty-free licensing for those incidental copies. The Register of Copyrights has recommended that instead of taking a licensing approach, the intermediate copies should granted a statutory exemption. My opinion is this would establish the intermediate copies as being fair use.

Hopefully those in congress who are considering this bill will take heed to what the Copyright Office has to say.