For all those with Music Lyrics sites

Im sure some of you will have heard of this before, but apparently its now illegal to display music lyrics on a website.

Read the full story here: http://www.pearworks.com/

 

That's been illlegal for a long long time; enforcement has simply been haphazard.

 

News Story:
Illegal Sheet Music, Guitar Tab and Song Lyrics Sites are about to face a major crackdown. Music sites illegally offering copyright, protected guitar tablature, sheet music and lyrics look to be under fire early next year.

From Ian Youngs, BBC News entertainment reporter
"Unauthorised guitar tabs and other musical scores are widely available
The music industry is to extend its copyright war by taking legal action against websites offering unlicensed song scores and lyrics.
The Music Publishers' Association (MPA), which represents US sheet music companies, will launch its first campaign against such sites in 2006 ... read the complete news story at the BBC News site http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4508158.stm

Be assured, however, that Musicnotes.com, the sheet music and guitar tab site I am associated with (see my signature), is a completely legal site only offering downloads of sheet music, guitar tabs and song lyrics they have a license with the publisher to offer online.

 

It's not going to be illegal if the lyrics have fallen into the public domain.

 

That's true, but doesn't that take like 70 years?

I guess we can still post classical music without any problems.

 

Classical music just tends to be short on lyrics at times.

 

The point is, displaying lyrics on a website is ripping off the songwriter. It is the same as if someone copied text on a website that is under copyright, and doing this without permission or credit given to the original author.

 

Guitar tab also? That seems to be going a little far. Guess I better get the TAB for Free bird while I can

 

Well, you can still display lyrics and guitar tabs for songs you write yourself.

 

There have been a lot of these sites for sale over the last few months, this might be one of the reasons.

 

I personally don't see that lyrics sites will be shut down. pearlyrics was more of an application for iTunes than it was a website. If you look at these kind of stats, http://www.azlyrics.com/adv.html - I don't expect that kind of site to be shutdown anytime soon. It would cause a lot of havoc in the industry if these kind of sites were to just disappear.

 

Seems to me that sites such as these would do a lot to popularize those very same songs and musicianmanship in general. Thus they could very well be the best advertisement the writers and record companies could ever hope to get.
In a sense it seems that when a SE caches your site and recieves traffic from the content would be considered infringement. But because there is a mutually beneficial benefit it is generally accepted....

 

I also agree, livingearth. If anything, the lyrics websites help publish artists and give them free publicity. It's a great promotion tool for artists. I think this would fall into a similar category of how MySpace offers music files put up on the Artists. Will the music industry then start sueing MySpace for infringement of hosting their music? I don't think so...

 

Sure, you can display your own lyrics and guitar tabs, but if you are a member of a songwriters association (SOCAN here in Canada), and you have the song title registered, others are still not allowed to copy the lyrics and tabs. But if you are not a member of an association which protects your material, then by all means, display all the lyrics and tabs you write yourself as you please.

cheers

 

So, supposing I listen to the song, and write down the lyrics as I hear them? Then post what I heard? Is that OK?

Or, to go a step further, I am very likely to have a mistake or two...(hold me closer, Tony Danza)...would that mitigate the copyright issue?

 

Nope.

Posting other peoples lyrics is still a copyright violation.

 

Opinion: If that were true, why are there thousands of lyrics websites out there that get millions of hits per month and are still allowed to operate? Why haven't they been shut down already?

 

If I were the record labels, this is what I would do:

Shut down the lyrics sites.
Put up lyric sites with my bands on them.
Put ads on the site.
Profit.

I am sure they would make quite a bit more than selling those lyrics books.

 

Just because someone does not defend their copyright does not mean there is no copyright infringement.

There was a time when record companies did nothing about music illegally downloaded. It was still illegal even though they did not act.

 

It is 70 years AFTER the death of the copyright holder.