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

[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.)