Guitartabs.com Suspends Under Legal Pressure 348
Music publishers are stepping up their campaign to remove guitar tablature from the Net. Recently Guitartabs.com received a nastygram from lawyers for the National Music Publishers Association and The Music Publishers Association of America. These organizations want to stretch the definition of their intellectual property to include by-ear transcriptions of music. Guitartabs.com is currently not offering tablature while the owner evaluates his legal options.
Re:Is it their property (Score:5, Informative)
finally a reason to thank the RIAA and DMCA (Score:3, Informative)
Metaltabs already went through this (Score:5, Informative)
Re:finally a reason to thank the RIAA and DMCA (Score:3, Informative)
If you enjoy downloading tabs off the net to learn new songs, this is not good news.
Re:IP issues. (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe. If you do it for cash, yes. Tab sites are commercial enterprises (note the banner ads). See this: http://www.snopes.com/music/songs/birthday.asp [snopes.com].
Re:Stairway (Score:5, Informative)
Store worker yanks the guitar from (Wayne, IIRC?), points to a sign posted that says "No Stairway", at which point Wayne and Garth look at each other and say "Denied".
They would have gotten away with it, too, if not for the meddling employee!
How is that different than my book review example? (Score:5, Informative)
In that case, no book reviews or movie reviews or any other review would ever be legal without express permission.
I can publish a movie review complete with character names, plot and spoilers.
You can read my movie review and write your own, private, screen play with that same plot and characters and events.
Two examples of "fair use".
Re:Fair use. (Score:5, Informative)
The sheet music publishers need to get over themselves. People who want to casually learn to play an instrument aren't going to go and pay hundreds of dollars for lessons and buy the sheet music of their favorite artists.
The really sad thing is that these lawsuits are killing what copyright was designed to protect, promotion of the arts.
Re:Appropriate response (Score:3, Informative)
You reverse engineer patents, not copyrights. (Score:3, Informative)
On top of that, the process isn't even the same. Reverse engineering takes place in clean rooms where the reverse engineering team are shielded from the actual product they're trying to copy. Not the case with transcribing a song - the transcriber listens to the song, so the transcriber is contaminated. The only way the concept of reverse engineering could even work would be if the person who did the transcription never listened to the song. Not going to happen. Transcribing a song is like listening to an audiobook, typing the words into your laptop and calling it an original work.
they should start suing each other. (Score:5, Informative)
Metallica has a good case against Kid Rock since American Badass sounds like Sad But True.
The Beatles should have sued the Monkeys for ripping off Paperback writer to bring up Last Train to Clarksville.
How about Don Henley's End of the Innocence and Bruce Hornsby's Thats Just The Way It Is".
Rod Stewart should sue Kiss for Hard Luck Woman its a complete copy of You Wear It Well.
A-Ha's take on me completely lifted the Police's Every Little Thing She Does is Magic.
Linkin Park should sue itself for making Pushing Me Avway and Numb which are nearly identical musically. Ditto for Nickelback.
While we are at it, lets just make it illegal to play any song using 12 bar blues
Re:Why is republisher's greed ok? (Score:3, Informative)
Publishing the transcription, in effect republishing the original artist's work, is the issue.
It's just as argueably a publishing of what I hear when I listen to "the original work". A conveyence of my own personal experiences.
Re:Appropriate response (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, they can. What they lose if they do that is the DCMA's protection against a civil suit.
The notion that if you follow the anti-takedown notice rules, the ISP is *prohibited* from removing the material in question is a popular one, but it's flat-out wrong:
Re:You reverse engineer patents, not copyrights. (Score:4, Informative)
Copyrights are weaker than patents in that they cover specifics rather than the abstract. However, copyright also has stronger rules about what is and isn't allowed with copyrighted works.
For instance, in the US it's illegal to create a derivative work of a copyrighted piece without permission of the copyright owner*. Not surprisingly, tabs and sheet music (objects created with the express purpose of allowing someone to recreate the original work), are covered by that rule. It may surprise you, but there are companies out there that produce tabs and sheet music for songs that have actually licensed the rights to do so. Not surprisingly, these companies are also not happy about people creating their own tabs/sheet music and (more importantly) distributing them over the Internet.
* Other provisions of Title 17 need to be taken into account, particularly Section 107 Fair Use. For example, a movie review only contains minute details about a movie's plot, so that is exempted from copyright law, as opposed to a (tran)script of the movie.
Tablature (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Reverse Engineering (Score:4, Informative)
No, I don't buy it. Writing down the script of the play would give you the exact script. However, a song is a human interpretation of written music, much like a binary is a computer translation of source code. The difference is that humans do not perform exactly what is written, while computers do. Further, other humans attempting to reverse-engineer the written music from the performance would also not transcribe the exact music as it was played. So, like the old game of "telephone" with one person whispering to another person, to yet another person, and then trying to figure out the original message, no transcription of a performance is going to get you the music as it was originally written. You would have a parody of the original written music - similar, but not quite exact.
parody (pr'-d) n., pl. -dies. [answers.com]
3. Music. The practice of reworking an already established composition, especially the incorporation into the Mass of material borrowed from other works, such as motets or madrigals.
And of course, parody is protected under copyright law.
I don't think you understand what tabs are (Score:3, Informative)
Here's an example of how generic chord sequences are and how the same chords show up repeatedly in different music [youtube.com]. If tabs (chord sequences) are protected under copyright, then story plots are copyrightable, the function of software code (not the exact implementation itself) is copyrightable, the compositional style of a photograph (e.g. upper torso portrait with 3/4 lighting [wikipedia.org]) is copyrightable. You're talking about a massive unprecedented expansion of the definition of what is copyrightable. An expansion that pretty obviously would shut down the cultural exchange of ideas as we know it.
Re:Fair use. (Score:3, Informative)
Judging from your story about buying a Beatles song book for $10 bucks, I know that you really haven't grasped the issue at hand, and don't play much guitar.
Sheet music is mostly written for piano. It represents a sort of lowest common denominator transcription of the music, like Muzak for singalongs. Guitar "song books" are much the same, but have guitar chords added. You think either represents the music the way it was played in the original song? Not bloodly likely.
Almost all sheet music is wrong. They may get the key correct, and a few of the chords might be correct, but that's the extent of it. You can play, for example, an A minor chord in an almost infinite number of ways. The variables include the number of strings used, the fret position, whether a capo is used, whether a different tuning was used. Different guitarists play in different ways.
The fret position and fingering is usually enough to get you in the right neighborhood. That's what guitar tabs offer and what sheet music can't and doesn't offer. Granted, if we're talking about the Beatles (or Country and Western, folk songs, etc.) where most all songs are played in open position and use very simple strumming or picking, you might get away with the sheet music. That's hardly true for guitarists like Robert Fripp, U2's The Edge, Jimmy Page of yesteryear, or even someone whos entirely derivative like Brian Setzer.
Sheet music is copyrighted tablature. Guitar tabs are reverse engineering.
Re:I don't think you understand what tabs are (Score:1, Informative)