Threat To Free, Legal Guitar Tablature Online 223
An anonymous reader writes "Recently Hal Leonard Corporation, the world's largest songbook publisher, sent an email to the music publishing and copyright community urging them not to license guitar tablature for free, advertising-supported use online. The email includes a number of factual errors and was potentially very damaging to the potential for a free, legal, and licensed destination for guitar tab online. Musicnotes and MXTabs have posted the full letter along with their response."
Make music illegal (Score:5, Interesting)
Why not just cut out all the BS and just make any kind of music ownership illegal. Musical instruments could be covered by the DMCA too since they can be used to copy (read play) a tune.
Oh that's we can't skip the BS right, because rich greed assholes can a make profit for a while this way.
Owning/buying music is quickly becoming no different morally to owning/buying blood diamonds. Hell, if they make musical instruments illegal perhaps the penalty for owning one could be that they cut off your hands.
IP law? It's just fucking entertainment. Get a grip!
FUD FUD FUD (Score:2, Interesting)
The latest MS vs Linux FUDding is very widely reported in the popular media. Perhaps that's triggering another run of this behavior through various industries.
Self defeating? (Score:5, Interesting)
mod parent insightful (Score:3, Interesting)
if they tighten the belt too much it stifles learning and enjoyment of music. If you don't enjoy it, you are less likely to buy.
The conspiracy theorist in me says that they are not this stupid and their end goal is to have some sort of nazification of the Arts. Wanna own/play a guitar kid? You'll need a license. What are you playing? License. Playing in public? Upgrade your license. Singing a protest song? Jail.
torrents (Score:4, Interesting)
Why shouldn't I share my efforts ?? (Score:5, Interesting)
Silly (Score:3, Interesting)
The music industry can't stop me from downloading a 300mb album.
The movie studios can't stop me from downloading an 1.4gb XviD.
The software industry can't stop me from downloading an 8gb ISO.
Who are these people kidding?
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
the tabs must be accurate enough... (Score:4, Interesting)
The tabs must, on the contrary, be reasonably accurate for Hal Leonard to be noticing any loss of business, which, as TFA explains, they probably aren't.
Libel? (Score:3, Interesting)
It looks to me like MxTabs would have a good chance of winning a libel suit over this (and possibly other stuff like 'interfering with a business relationship' or something.) The letter repeatedly claims they are publishing illegal music, when in fact it is all authorized. Indeed, the letter is trying to convince people not to grant permission to MxTabs, which would be utterly pointless if MxTabs were illegally ignoring permissions. (Other bits might also be libelous, but this is the stand-out obvious one.)
However, the likelihood of winning in court does not guarantee that there is a good business case for suing.
Is there a lawyer in the house who might like to comment?
Re:How long will this go on? (Score:2, Interesting)
ABC format is another threatened format (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Infuriating (Score:1, Interesting)
I was so infuriated that I actually read the article, and it seems to me that it's just hot air and bad title on Slashdot's part.
The company (HAL?) basically sent emails and made phone calls to musicians urging them not to use the site, and calling the site basically a music sheets pirating (if such thing existed) site.
No one is suing anybody, it's just a FUD scam from that company.
If I was MXTabs I would be on the phone with my lawyers right now for a nice defamatory law suit against that company.
Re:Feeling the Pain (Score:2, Interesting)
Konami, the producer of DDR, keeps a very close watch on the open source project StepMania [stepmania.com] (not GPL), which has enabled all players to play their copyrighted songs AND the copyrighted steps on their computer all for free. Konami is also trying to protect the concept of DDR, which they have a patent for. They already are suing one company who based their game off StepMania and so far nothing has happened but it it is still scheduled. Konami, however, never licensed the Japanese version of the game for North America (most DDRs, especially DDR Extremes at Namco arcades, are pirated in the US; you should ask the manager to let you see the CD in the arcade cabinet, it'll be a CDR). ITG (In the Groove), the commercial StepMania derivative, was made after 3 years of having no new DDR version come out beyond the fact that the Japanese versions are technically illegal in North America. The last legal one for US was made in 2000 and is very dated in that sense. Only last year did Konami make a new DDR version (in response to ITG) licensed for US, realising that DDR is still popular around the world, unlike in Japan where it is nearly dead.
Much like the guitar tab posting community, the so-called "DDR community" online has been copying the exact step patterns from the games for years and converting them into a plain-text format that can be used with a number of game simulators (including StepMania). These do take time and people are just nice enough to share. Different is that there's also music being copied which makes sites that host much more liable for copyright infringement, and they also feel the need to rip the graphics associated with each song (StepMania, with skins, can look near-perfectly the same as a real DDR game; the ripped graphics from the game further enhance this capability). Konami has got a few sites hosting dance steps and songs to shut down before and has threatened legal action.
Basically, Konami is fully aware of the "DDR community" and its activities (there have been other simulators threatened legal action in Japan by Konami as well), and it has been since about late 2002 when a fair number of step patterns, song recordings, and graphics were stolen from a beta testing machine (of the new version of the time) in an arcade in Japan, and then were subsequently converted to a format usable by StepMania. People were not supposed to be allowed to record at all at the beta testing, but apparently they did not check well enough. Now Konami never lets anyone come to beta test a machine without a full check to make sure they do not have any kind of recording device, including a cell phone that can do more than calls (which is every phone in Japan).
Re:Infuriating (Score:5, Interesting)
A young guy picks up a guitar and messes around with it. He can't play a thing, and isn't really interested in investing the time to take proper lessons. He discovers OLGA. He downloads a few simple tabs of Nirvana songs. He works his way up to Metallica, Alice in Chains. He eventually realizes his technique could use some improvement. He starts downloading Bach, Beethoven, etc., because they present more of a challenge. Eventually, he is playing complex works like Leyenda and Capricho Arabe.
Eventually, he notices there is something fundamentally different in the approach modern music takes from classical music. It "moves" differently. He starts to pay attention to the notes, chord changes, rhythms, and eventually decides that the IT career that he never really cared for just doesn't compete with the idea of learning and perhaps teaching music. He signs up for music theory at his local college. It turns out his technique is good, and he has a knack for music theory, he has perfect pitch, and has such a knack at piano that he has gone from barely being able to read a staff to playing Bach Preludes and Beethoven. All in all, a promising student. He has a 4.0 GPA and a letter of recommendation to one of the most prestigious music colleges in the US where he will study music theory.
Not so far fetched, that's me. I wouldn't be going for a masters in music theory (or composition, I haven't quite decided) had it not been for OLGA helping me learn that I have quite a knack for music to begin with. If I had to stick to public domain stuff, I probably would have given up. I simply didn't expect it to be anything but a hobby I did when I came home from programming all day. But OLGA got me started enough to realize that, for me at least, it was worth the investment.
Society benefits from the free and open spread of information. Copyright is just a means to that end: provide incentives for artists to continue creating. But IP is not Freedom of Speech or Habaeus Corpus - it is not a fundamental right. The DMCA hurts society, and I hope to God that somebody important pays attention to the fact that it is being used to shut down educational sites.
In fact, now that I think about it, nothing that was copyrighted after I was born will move into the public domain before I die of old age... That goes for me, you, my kids, anybody born within the past 20 years. Do you remember when it came out? Then you will never see it in the public domain. But no, apparently we need even tougher copyright controls, can't have people learning how to make the music that got you rich enough to buy the politicians who keep sponsoring idiotic legislation like the DMCA in the first place. Idiots.
Re:Oblig Simpsons Reference (Score:4, Interesting)
He talks about a court case that determined only 4 notes had to be in common to violate copyright. With that logic, he determined that there are only 46,656 distinct melodies.
Assume that all songs use a Western musical scale and that such a scale contains twelve distinct intervals. Assume that a judge (not a musician but a judge) will distinguish three distinct note durations (which roughly correspond to eighth, quarter, and half notes, or through a trivial change in time signature, to quarter, half, and whole notes, or to sixteenth, eighth, and quarter notes). Thus, there are 36 possible distance vectors from one note to the next, and 36^(n - 1) melodies of n notes.
And not all of those would be worth listening to... so pretty much any 4-notes you play probably violate someone's copyright.
Re:Self defeating? (Score:2, Interesting)
to be honest, removing tabs would be like filtering out all those non-talented musicians who would give up learning if they can't LISTEN to the music. ofcourse the RIAA wants to remove that as well.
Re:Make music illegal (Score:2, Interesting)
1) He doesn't have to obtain permission to do the parody under Fair Use. However, he always asks permission from the artist anyway. If the artist doesn't give permission, Weird Al doesn't put the parody on the album. (Yes, there was the whole Coolio thing, but that was some serious miscommunication.)
2) His band-mates are pretty accomplished musicians, considering the wide variety of genres of music that they play for the parodies, and they actually learn the music for songs by playing it by ear.
That's not the point (Score:3, Interesting)
Porn? No. Tab! (Score:3, Interesting)
Quality... (Score:4, Interesting)
Very, very few tabs on sites like Olga come even close to the quality of a decent tab book.
F5, A#5, G5, C5 may well be the chords to the main part of Teen Spirit but tells me nothing about strum patterns, rhythm, which strings I should be missing on certain strums, etc. It tells me nothing about C and F notes that chime out afterwards.
Ironically, for all the claims of "I'm not good enough to figure out how to play a song by ear..." - to use most online tabs, aside from getting pointed in the right direction, you really do need to have an ear for rhythm, an ear for when exactly the chord changes happen, what the strum patterns are, when to use up vs. downstrokes, etc.
There is a major problem in the printed music world that only better known artists merit the expense of producing a good tab book and that most of those books are only available via special order. Still, when they do exist, when you can find them (this is starting to sound like the A-Team), the world of difference between them and the average tab is astronomical.
I'm caught in the middle: I'd hate to see high quality publishing disappear but I also don't see low quality, text based tabs (that often have five different, all disagreeing, version) really being that much of a threat.
Then again, in a world where record companies are trying to shore up CD sales, about about including a DVD with video files of exactly what the artists' hands did when playing the songs, lyrics and scores included? Given the choice between iTunes' $0.99 a limited song and $1.29 an unlocked one, I'd rather drop $15 on an album that'll teach me how to play its content as well. Sure, on a one-off basis, those costs would be huge but if it were done for every album, economies of scale could turn it in to a day's filming, a quick editing job and a day or two of a cheap person transcribing it.