Idolator

Wow, holding a search engine responsible for the pages it finds. Just when you think it can't get more absurd, it does.

It would be nice to have some sort of, I dunno, more official-ish lyrics site in place. I wouldn't want to pay money for it (I mean, come on, this is the Internet...) but sometimes I have to dig up lyrics, and the places like azlyrics can be wildly inaccurate and really annoying (hey azlyrics: I give a fuck about the next generation of smileys, k?).

Of course, I have no doubt that the publishers will create something much, much worse.

Once this skirmish turns into the inevitable, DCMA-fueled war, I'll be interested to see whether the labels will be allowed to take down sites like AZ and Lyrics wholesale, or whether they'll be forced to demand takedowns on a song-by-song basis.

I could picture a scenario whereby when a big label declares that a song is theirs, that particular page is compelled to be taken down, but any unclaimed songs stay up. That's how lyrics to orphan or indie songs could remain available as a supplement to the Yahoo!s of the world.

I know, this is an unrealistically tidy scenario I'm dreaming up.

@RickSlick: [lyricwiki.org] - if the lyrics are wrong, change them yourself.

I wonder if songmeanings.net will be affected? It seems to be following the same protocol my college does when screening movies.

This is OUT OF HAND! Seriously, printing lyrics on the internet is copyright infringement? Am I going to get arrested for singing in my car in the not-so-distant future?

@whoneedslight: no. you'll just have to pay an ascap and bmi licensing fee for your car... and shower.

    How about lyrics that are both wrong, and an un-formatted mess; jumbled together with no capital letters, no punctuation, or line-breaks of any kind? I think sites that post those things should be sued first.

    I want to be able to cut and paste those things into my .mp3s effortlessly. If I have to check and format the danged thing, it would be faster just to type it off the CD jacket! If the record industry is going to go this route, I think they have the responsibility to clean this mess up! Otherwise... You might not want to antagonize the few paying customers you have left!

When Olga went down a little bit of me died. No more drunken piano singalongs at my house as I furiously tried to figure out Journey songs on the keys whilst reading Olga printouts.

@Labtheque: Commentary on the lyrics would be considered fair use, though IANAcopyrightL. After all, one couldn't properly dissect lyrics without having the lyrics themselves at hand.

@whoneedslight: Without getting too serious here, but a couple of things:
1. You don't get arrested for copyright infringement. Distributing pirated materials is a criminal act, simply infringing on copyright is not. You would get the ol' cease-and-desist, then the lawsuit, but you won't get hauled downtown.

2. Second, singing in your car is neither publishing nor performing publicly, unless you turned your car into a mobile karaoke box or you had an audience in your shower.
If you're going to claim something is absurd, can you come up with an analogy that isn't equally as absurd?

Look, this all seems stupid and shortsighted, which is exactly what we expect from the music industry. But intellectual property is intellectual property, and content owners are well within their rights to enforce copyright.

That these sites look like they were designed in 1996 and are error-prone don't mean shit - they're breaking the law, breaking the law /Beavis. Whether this is worth their time and legal fees is another matter, but it's not my money, so what do I care?

I shed a tear for OLGA too.

lyrics.ch didn't go down that long ago. Actually, I guess it did.

[en.wikipedia.org]

I can't find the guy's first-hand account of the imperial stormtroopers taking every last computer in his house, but I did find it strange that the only website that the RIAA had taken down was the one that wasn't ad-supported.

Maybe they've just been waiting until these websites have some assets worth suing for?

Lyric sites perform a valuable public service because no one can understand singers anyway. Hell, even the Santa Fe Opera has a little seat back storyline thingy so you can tell what the fuck is going on.

So you've thrown away your choice
Of lobster tickets
So you're hot to stay on . . .

"Year of the Cat"
Al Stewart

@whoneedslight "This is OUT OF HAND! Seriously, printing lyrics on the internet is copyright infringement?" Why yes, actually it is and always has been. They haven't enforced it until now, but song lyrics are a copyrighted published work and printing them anywhere without permission is illegal and always has been.

It's no different than if I wanted to post the entire text of the new Harry Potter book on my website.

There are a ton of copyright laws I don't agree with, but this one I think is entirely reasonable. I just wonder why it took them so long to enforcing the laws. I think it's going to be hard to drum up much public sympathy because free lyric sites have been operating for so long that people are going to assume that it's just the evil RIAA (who really have nothing to do with this) trying to squeeze a few more pennies out of innocent consumers rather than see that this one is actually pretty fair and other people's lyrics shouldn't have been published for free in the first place.