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

[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?