Crap!

[boji.livejournal.com]

This Fanlib approach to user generated content isn't just happening to fandom. this article in the technology section of The Guardian Newspaper talks about musical publishers seeking yearly licenses from fansites that quote/archive song lyrics.

And I quote:

In answer to the question of why aren't we giving away lyrics free now, the better question is, why were we giving them away for all those years? We've looked at the huge demand and decided that this is an untapped income stream."

eta:

Now admittedly this product in this instance - the lyrics - do belong to the artists who penned them and haven't been altered, transformed or used in a derivative way by the people hosting them on websites, for the most part. But... I find it oddly mercenary, though not surprising.

The wonder of the web is, for the most part, user generated content, be that meta, discussions, fiction, blogs, lyrics, wikipedia... And I can foresee them trying to force us to pay for access to what we, as a collective, create. And that's on top of paying our ISP's of course.

Comments

[scarah2.livejournal.com]

Hoboy.

Well, in the US anyway it's Fair Use to reprint excerpts of things for the purposes of analysis or critique. Works in their entirety are another story. So these guys may have a point.

[boji.livejournal.com]

Works in their entirety are another story. So these guys may have a point.
Yes, I just edited the post and said so... having thought about it BUT there is still something insidious in the wind.

I guess it's because for most of us (at least as I see it) the net functions as ones own personal access point to a public glut/library of information.

[lafemmedarla]

They do have a point, but sill... wow.

This Fanlib approach to user generated content isn't just happening to fandom.

I had just posted on my journal about CBS buying out last.fm. Maybe I am being paranoid, but with the CBS/Fanlib connection.... *eyes that*

[g_shadowslayer]

Wait -- what?!

So... let me get this straight -- in their world, you can't know what the words to a song are unless you buy the CD which may or MAY NOT have the lyrics in the liner notes?

So... what if you hear it on the radio and want to know the lyrics?

Argh. Head. Hurts. Brain. Melting!

[zellieh]

But does that even make sense, marketwise? I've bought CD's after googling for the lyrics to find out the name of the song and who it was by, and I can't be the only person who's done that.

[cesperanza.livejournal.com]

Oh, crap; thank you for finding this. Depressing, but I'd rather know about it than not know.

[gilded_lady]

Ditto.

[maeglinyedi.livejournal.com]

To be honest, I don't find it odd at all that the music business is looking into making a profit off material they actually own. There are countless add-supported websites out there making money from these lyrics, while in fact they have no right to these lyrics in the first place.

It's not like FanLib at all. FanLib is trying to make money off material they don't own. This whole lyrics business is similar to me creating a website, full of ads that will make me money, with all the original Harry Potter books up on the site for everyone to read. You betcha JKR's lawyers would come calling if I tried something like that. So no, I'm not surprised nor upset the music business is looking into this. If anything, I'm surprised they've let it slide for so long.

[maeglinyedi.livejournal.com]

Heh, on second thought, it actually is a lot like FanLib...except in this case those lyrics sites are the FanLibs. Not the music industry which is only trying to look after material they own. ;-)

[that_mireille]

And the music business appears to be willing, at least from the paraphrase here, to let the sites exist as long as they pay a licensing fee. Which... well, when *I* was a teenager, the way you got song lyrics was to buy magazines full of them, which had to pay licensing fees. (OTOH, they got the lyrics right, which I note a lot of lyrics sites do not always do.)

And song lyrics are not derivative works--it's hard to argue that quoting the *entire* text of a song is "fair use."

[maeglinyedi.livejournal.com]

it's hard to argue that quoting the *entire* text of a song is "fair use."

Exactly. And this isn't about the big corporate sharks going after the small people on the net. I'm quite sure the music business isn't going to mess with some 13-year-old emo kid posting lyrics of a few favorite songs on her myspace account.

They're going after the big websites who are making (probably quite some) money off posting thousands of song lyrics. And I really can't blame the music industry for that. Why should someone else be making money off stuff they own? It only makes sense they're doing something about that and try to get some profit out of it themselves.

[manna]

I don't have much of a problem with this. If they start going after small fansites, that will suck (although in the one example the article gives, the copyright owner backed off from fansites).

However, if you Google for 'lyrics', what comes up are a mass of ugly sites plastered with ads and occasionally spyware. The majority of them aren't fan sites in any sense of the world -- they're farming ads through content scraping (as is obvious from the fact that they all share the same misspelling of lyrics). Frankly, I don't blame the copyright holders for wondering why all that ad revenue is going into someone else's pockets.

(Ironically, if there's one thing those large lyric databases remind me off, it's fanlib.)

[ficchica.livejournal.com]

Honestly I don't really see the similarity with fanlib and don't really have a problem with it. I'm sure I've read articles that warn authors that if they use lyrics then they have to negotiate it with the copyright holders before hand and pay the appropriate fees.

[lttledvl.livejournal.com]

they're just greedy bastards

i've only looked up lyrics when i can't understand what the hell the singer is saying (ever tried to actually understand some heavy metal? or even better, death metal?)

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

I have to say, I'm on the side of the guys who wrote the song lyrics. Now, quoting song lyrics is an overextension and should be protected. I quote literary works all the time and I shouldn't have to pay for it.

But listing the lyrics in full, well, that is someone else's work.

Of course, I wonder if this'll just shut those sites down or force them underground. Because although I do use those sites, I'm not going to pay to access song lyrics, are you?

Icarus

[boji.livejournal.com]

If I believed that the artists who penned the songs, rather than the record companies who publish them, would be the ones making the money it would rile me less. But yes, I imagine that sites will slowly wither and die.

My true point, I think was what I said in the second comment down, that I conceive of the net as a public library of a sort. With access to song lyrics and Shakespeare.

And, possibly wrongly I think of ISP fees as community tax.

I regret the fact that I can now conceive of a near future in which all information housed on the net will be passworded away for access via cash.

A little like access to the Athens university network maybe? In which poorer colleges have access to some e-journals and richer colleges have access to all?

And wasn't that a tangent?

[read-in-reverse.livejournal.com]

As someone working for a small business all I can say is...yes this is likely. Especially in this current atmosphere. Not a day goes by that some music company isn't calling us wanting to force us to get a license for music we never play. We have to play derivative songs, songs that are in the public domain, or else we face a lawsuit. These people are sharks. I'm so sick of companies wanting to control copyright so fiercely they overlook the fact that yeah we own the songs that we bought and we should be able to play them for a lot of people without having six different companies phone us about it all the time. We're so scared of them now we won't even have live music concerts encase the artists are affliated with some music company. We should be able to tell other people the lyrics to the songs we love without having to pay. Next thing...we won't be able to sing songs to our children without getting permission. This is just sickening.

[lyssie.livejournal.com]

...does no one remember the lyrics site that got shut down by the RIAA something like five years ago? Lyrics.ch? I think?

Because this isn't exactly new.