According to wikipedia, the latest shut down occurred on July 27, 2006 after receiving a take down letter from the MPA and NMPA. Here’s what the olga.net site says as of today:

OLGA is currently offline while we attempt to resolve legal issues with the archive.

We received a ‘take down’ letter (pages 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 ) from lawyers representing the NMPA and the MPA.

We greatly appreciate your support and hope to return to providing resources to the aspiring guitarist as soon as possible. Contact rcwoods for more information.

7 years ago, Mxtabs was started as a hobby by an aspiring drummer attempting to learn his favorite songs. Over the years, the tab site blossomed into a valuable resource for thousands of musicians. We’ve enjoyed hearing the success stories of thousands of guitar, bass, and drum players who have increased their skills and grown through their use of this website.

Unfortunately, it is now time to close the doors of Mxtabs.

“U.S. digital entertainment company Gracenote on Thursday said it obtained licenses to distribute lyrics as music publishers mulled legal action against Web sites that provide them without authorization.”

read more | digg story

Even though Gracenote has a deal to distribute lyrics with digital music, the article doesn’t get into too many details about what they’re going to do about the unauthorized lyrics sites out there. About the only insight they give is “Peer said he hopes the unauthorized sites will seek licenses.” Or else what?

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.

It’s amazing how there can be such discrepancies on such a simple statement of fact (and I’m referring specifically to United States law) - Is copyright infringement via P2P a criminal offense or just civil? Nick from Slyck says it is just civil. (FYI: explanation of criminal vs. civil)

I am not a lawyer, but I disagree with Nick. In the forum thread I referenced earlier, there were a few voices that cried foul, but for the most part, everyone was left believing file sharing is only a civil offense when there is no financial gain since people share files for free in P2P. Here’s what I know about this, and hopefully someone can either back up or refute what I’m saying.

• So far the RIAA has been filing civil lawsuits, but it doesn’t mean criminal charges aren’t a possibility for other cases.
• Title 17 of the United States Code Chapter 5 Section 506 states how there can be criminal punishment for both commercial and non-commercial copyright infringement. In situations where there’s no personal gain, it’s still a crime as long as the retail value of the copyrighted works exceeds $1,000. Also refer to the change made in Chapter 1 Section 101, which states: “The term ‘financial gain’ includes receipt, or expectation of receipt, of anything of value, including the receipt of other copyrighted works.“
• It is because of the No Electronic Theft (”NET”) Act of 1997 that much of the verbiage was added to indicate non-commercial infringement was also a crime.
• That change in law was a direct response to the court decision in United States v. LaMacchia (1994), in which an MIT student won the case against him because the file sharing he was doing was non-commercial. The infringement in this case was computer software, but still can be relevant to all file sharing.

So, in conclusion, before the NET Act, you could argue that non-commercial copyright infringement was not a criminal act, but current law makes it so.

Edited to add:
News broke today at CNET News.com that U.S. Congress has drafted a bill to further tighten copyright law, and the federal government’s power to enforce it. Read more… Congress readies new digital copyright bill

http://www.mpa.org/news/show/5

Several points are made in the statement.

• MPA members invest a significant amount into arranging, engraving, editing, marketing and distributing sheet music products, and illegal tablature cuts into their sales.
• Sharing the tabs is bad enough, but even worse is when sites make money off the illegal tabs.
• Guitar tabs do not circumvent copyright laws just because they’re claimed to be personal interpretations.
• Viewing illegal tabs is equivalent to stealing sheet music from a store.
• The MPA isn’t targeting authorized websites, and will work with sites that want to build a legitimate business.

According to wikipedia, mxtabs went back online February 24, 2006.

The Music Publishers Association is set to begin sending out cease-and-desist letters in March to dozens of offending sites that failed to secure approval to use sheet music from the respective copyright holders, sources aid.

The decision making process seems to be taking a long time. Are they evaluating the public reaction? Are they waiting for legitimate lyrics services to have a good foothold? It’s tough to tell at this point.

Thanks to this post at geek/talk for this latest MPA update.

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.