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Quote:The US Music Publishers' Association (MPA), which represents sheet music companies, will launch its first campaign against websites offering unlicensed song scores and lyrics in 2006. What is more, MPA president Lauren Keiser said he wanted site owners to be jailed.

Quoted by the BBC, he said the Xerox machine used to be "the big usurper of our potential income," but these days, "the internet is taking more of a bite out of sheet music and printed music sales so we're taking a more proactive stance".


Keiser said the MPA would target "very big sites that people would think are legitimate and very, very popular".

Guitar licks and song scores are widely available on the internet but are "completely illegal", he said, which adds: "The campaign comes after lyric-finding software PearLyrics was forced off the internet by a leading music publishing company, Warner Chappell. PearLyrics worked with Apple's iTunes, searching the internet to find lyrics for songs in a user's collection.

"I just don't see why PearLyrics should infringe the copyright of Warner Chappell because all I'm doing is searching publicly-available websites," the story has PearLyrics developer Walter Ritter saying. It would be different if they had an alternative service that also provided lyrics online and also integrated [with iTunes] like PearLyrics did. But they don't offer anything like that at all."

I bolded the important parts so you don't have to read all of it. This sucks majorly. I love playing my guitar... but I guess making my own tabs would be somewhat fun. And by "fun" I mean irritating.

Guitar tabs are tabs people make up to what they think the song sounds like. And banning lyrics? That's just ridiculous. Some CD folds don't even offer lyrics.


^^^ I hate this person forever.

Yea.. ridiculous.

Soon we'll be banning publication of recipes for making commercially available food... since apparently, instructions on how to reproduce something someone else made is copyright infringement...

Nooo :cry: Don't away ultimate-guitar.com, don't do it :cry:

Banning Lyrics?!??! That's absurd!

Guess I need to get all the sheet music for my piano now while I still can

Almost all guitar tab sites don't give tabs as of now.


Ultimate-guitar however, is still free to give out tabs FYI... don't ask me why.

Alright, that's it. I'm saving all the songs I like... well ones that I can think of at the moment :lol:

Edit: O...kay.. Ultimate-guitar has gone kind of spastic on me. I got "!!" on some pages (white background), and some other wierd gibberish. Probably a coding problem :S

Eh, and links for some songs... like say I'm looking for a tab and its meant to go to the tab page but instead it goes to the chord one. Besides, doesn't ultimate-guitar get some tabs off other sites?

Uh oh. I'll need to download all the final fantasy music sheets that i love.

Tards o_o

Now I am going to have to start saving all the tabs that I use...

I think its a pretty good indicator of which side the legal system is on too, when you can get more time in jail for selling a copied CD than some people convicted of manslaughter get.

And now we have completely free online interpretive services coming under scrutiny and they're losing the battles because they don't have the same money to throw at lawyers to come up with rediculous conspiracy theories (like free lyrics promote illegal music downloads, because they're used to substitute the insert that comes with the CD) like the entertainment industry does.

But, yeah, I'm just going to save a few tabs I can't do without, and hope some good chain link in the law system will see this civil-suit for what it's worth.

^^^ Well said

Some CD's don't even come with proper inserts, therefor - no lyrics. And what do you do when you purchase the song from an online provider (such as Napster, or iTunes)?

Gr... stupid people with their stupid money.

bah, doesn't matter, people will still do it anyway, they can't jail everybody...