NONKINSENSE

Every Grain of Sand-Bob Dylan

In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed
There's a dyin' voice within me reaching out somewhere,
Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair.

Copyright © 1981 Special Rider Music

 #  posted by NONKINSENSE @ 12:01 AM //

Guys and Gals,

I hope to see you at the Saturday jam session. There will be lots of new songs by artists you've requested:

And many more.

StarRobers August 21, 2006E-Commerce Report Now the Music Industry Wants Guitarists to Stop Sharing By BOB TEDESCHI The Internet put the music industry and many of its listeners at odds thanks to the popularity of services like Napster and Grokster. Now the industry is squaring off against a surprising new opponent: musicians. In the last few months, trade groups representing music publishers have used the threat of copyright lawsuits to shut down guitar tablature sites, where users exchange tips on how to play songs like "Knockin on Heaven's Door","Highway to Hell" and thousands of others.The battle shares many similarities with the war between Napster and the music recording industry, but this time it involves free sites like Olga.net, GuitarTabs.com and MyGuitarTabs.com and even discussion boards on the Google Groups service like alt.guitar.tab and rec.music.makers.guitar.tablature, where amateur musicians trade tabs-music notation especially for guitar-for songs they have figured out or have copied from music books. On the other side are music publishers like Sony/ATV, which holds the rights to the songs of John Mayer, and EMI, which publishes ChristinaAguilera's music. People can get it for free on the Internet, and it's hurting the songwriters, said Lauren Keiser, who is president of the Music Publishers Association and chief executive of Carl Fischer, a music publisher in NewYork. So far, the Music Publishers Association and the National Music Publishers Association have shut down several Web sites, or have pressured them to remove all of their tabs, but users have quickly migrated to other sites. According to comScore Media Metrix, an Internet statistics service,Ultimate-Guitar.com had 1.4 million visitors in July, twice the number from a year earlier. The publishers, who share royalties with composers each time customers buy sheet music or books of guitar tablature, maintain that tablature postings,even inaccurate ones, are protected by copyright laws because the postings represent derivative works related to the original compositions, to use the industry jargon.The publishers told the sites that if they did not remove the tablatures,they could face legal action or their Internet service providers would be pressured to shut down their sites. All of the sites have taken down their tabs voluntarily, but grudgingly.The tablature sites argue that they are merely conduits for an online discussion about guitar techniques, and that their services help theindustry. The publishers can't dispute the fact that the popularity of playing guitar has exploded because of sites like mine, said Robert Balch, the publisher of Guitar Tab Universe (guitartabs.cc), in Los Angeles. And any person that buys a guitar book during their lifetime, that money goes to the publishers. Mr. Balch, who took down guitar tabs from his site in late July at the behest of the music publishers, added that, "I'd think the music publishers would be happy to have sites that get people interested in becoming one of their customers".Cathal Woods, who manages Olga.net, one of the pioneer free tablature sites, said he had run the site for 14 years with the help of a systems administrator, and we've never taken a penny. Mr. Woods, who teaches philosophy at Virginia Wesleyan College in Norfolk, said Olga.net had earned an undisclosed amount of money by posting ads on Google's behalf, but he said that money had paid for bandwidth and a legal defense fund. Anthony DeGidio, a lawyer for Olga.net, said he was still formulating a legal strategy, while also helping decide whether the site could pay licensing fees in the event that that's required. For now, though, the site remains unavailable to users. Because the music tablature sites are privately held, they do not disclose sales figures, and because industry analysts generally do not closely follow tablature sites, it is unclear how much revenue they generate. But with the Internet advertising market surging, almost any Web site with significant traffic can generate revenue. Google also dabbles in tablature through its Google Groups discussion board service, in which guitar players trade tabs they have figured out by listening to the songs, or by copying tabs found elsewhere. A Google spokesman, Steve Langdon, said Google would take down music tablature from it's Groups service if publishers claimed the materials violated copyright agreements and if Google determined that infringement was likely. Under theDigital Millennium Copyright Act, Web hosts may review, case by case, a publisher's claims regarding instances of copyright infringement. To hear music publishers tell it, though, the tablature sites are getting away with mass theft. Mr. Keiser, of the Music Publisher's Association, said that before these sites started operating in the early 90's, the most popular printed tablatures typically sold 25,000 copies in a year. Now the most popular sell 5,000 copies at most. But Mike Happoldt, who was a member of the '90's band Sublime and whose music is sold in sheet music books, said he sympathized with the tablature sites."I think this is greed on the publishers parts", said Mr. Happoldt, who played guitar on Sublime's hit "What I Got ". I guess in a way I might be losing money from these sites, but as a musician I look at it more as a service, said Mr. Happoldt, who now owns an independent record company, Skunk Records. And really, those books just don't sell that much for most people. Assuming a tablature site musters the legal resources to challenge the publishers in court, some legal scholars say they believe publishers may have difficulty arguing their complaints successfully. Jonathan Zittrain,the professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University,said it isn't at all clear that the publishers claim would succeed because no court doctrine has been written on guitar tablature. Mr. Zittrain said the tablature sites could well have a free speech defense. But because the Supreme Court, in a 2003 case involving the extension of copyright terms, declined to determine when over enforcement orinterpretation of copyright might raise a free speech problem, the successof that argument was questionable. ³It¹s possible, though, that this is one reason why guitar tabs generated by people would be found to fit fair use,Mr. Zittrain said, or would be found not to be a derivative work to beginwith. Doug Osborn, an executive vice president with Ultimate-Guitar.com said hissite violated no laws because its headquarters were in Russia, and the site's practices complied with Russian laws. Jacqueline C. Charlesworth, senior vice president and general counsel of the National Music Publisher's Association, would not comment on the legality of specific sites, including Ultimate-Guitar, but she said she had seen no international licensing agreements that might make free UnitedStates distribution of guitar tablature legal.Online discussion boards have been thick with comments from guitar tablature fans, looking for sites that are still operating and lamenting the fate of sites they frequented. One user of the guitarnoise.com forums, who calls himself the dali lima,said he had no doubt that the music publishers would win the battle. Hopefully we will get to a place where the sheet music/tab will be available online just like music $0.99 a song. The ironic thing might bethat a service like that with fully licensed music/tab offered at a lowper song rate might actually benefit guitar players by providing thecorrect music/tab and not the garbage that we currently sift through. A small handful of sheet music sites now sell guitar tablature. Mr. Keiser,of the Music Publisher's Association, estimated that, including over headcosts, tablature could cost about $800 per song to produce, license and format for downloading. Musicnotes, an online sheet music business based in Madison, Wis., is considering a deeper push into guitar tablature, said Tim Reiland, thecompany's chairman and chief financial officer. The site has a limited arrayof tablature available now for about $5 a song, and it also offers tablature as part of $10 downloadable guitar lessons. But Mr. Reiland said that with the music publishers dealing with the freesites, and a stronger ad market, his business might be able to lower the cost of its guitar tabs. Maybe we could sell some of the riffs to Jimmy Page's solo in "Stairway to Heaven" for a buck, since that's really what the kids want to learn anyway, Mr. Reiland said. Low prices are only part of the battle, though, Mr. Reiland said. The free tablature sites often host vibrant communities of musicians, who rate eachother's tablature and trade ideas and commentary, and Musicnotes would have to find a way to replicate that environment on its site. Furthermore, these communities often create tablature for songs that have little or no commercial value, he said. Less than 25 percent of the music out there ends up in sheet music becausesometimes it just doesn't pay to do it, Mr. Reiland said. So the fact that someone comes up with a transcription themselves just because they love that song and want to share it with people, there's some value to that. I don't have an answer for that, Mr. Reiland added. But I think the industry needs to play around with it, because it could be a nice source of revenue for songwriters, and for the community it could be a really good thing. I actually knew someone thru a friend who worked for a music publisher and we debated this topic more than once. One of her jobs was to mail letters to all the artists under that published, trying to get them to sign on and support shutting down the sites.

Her argument was that it was copyright violation - the words, melody, arrangements, all of it is copyrighted. I kept trying to explain that the tabs that people come up with are not like them trying to figure out the reciepe for Coca Cola or something and publishing it. Music is a commodity, but putting up a tab for a song, especially if it's one of your own devising from listening to it, is not like stealing a loaf of bread from a store, in my opinion. (TA)

It remains to be seen who will win this case, but I have a feeling that the publishers might win because of the way the laws are written and the legal precedents that are out there already. Greed. Lawyers need to eat too...What would it be, nearly maybe 1% of the songs I'd want the music to would probably end up printed in books that would make the publishers money anyway. As Rob mentions, this is an extension to the way musicians would have just passed along info anyway. As some guitarist spends the time to tab something out, shouldn't that tab then become that guitarists intellectual property? (if Jimmy Page wants the money, why doesnt he do it?)Anyway - there is apparently still alot available via Russian sites, and the olga database is accessible, but only the Russian and possibly, apparently, some of the Swedish links will give you anything.Get em while you can.....(DR) David nailed it - almost none of the music we play is available commercially. Music publishers recycle the same 200 or 300 hit songs from the 60's over and over in a thousand different books. The same is true for the 70's, 80's and 90's. No problem - that's where the profit is.

But then they have no credibility when the complain that a song that, if it ever was available commercially, has gone out of print 30 years ago. These tabs cannot hurt the sales of sheet music for that song. But what they might do is actually spark some interest in the song and keep sales of the recording alive.

Music publishers should be forced to show that the songs are available commercially in print music before they can register any complaint. And that is just the minimum. Even then, their case is weak and not at all comparable to the Napster case. They are using threats of extortion to close these sites. I don't think they want to go to court, because they know they'll lose.

starriders The music publishers have very little to gain by closing down these sites, since the vast majority of the songs on the site are not available in sheet music anyway. Of those songs available, most are available in forms not very useful to guitarists. So they are losing little if any money to these sites.

Yes, they have closed down some. But what they really want is a piece of the action from the sites that remain. These sites are frequently visited, which means advertising money, and the publishers want a cut of it. They might also come up with a fee - either per song or per month for access to the site.

Fine. Such a fee might actually be useful to musicians if it leads to some quality control of the tabs. The vast majority of them are done poorly. Many are just outright wrong, and many others are incomplete. There are many that bear no relationship to the song at all.

If the publishers want to complain, let them make the songs available. Right now, they're doing nothing but sitting on the rights to songs that have not been in print for 20, 30 or40 years or more (if they were ever in print) and complaining that they're losing money when someone posts it on a music site. That's the height of hypocrisy, and I think the courts will recognize it as such.

starRobriders

 #  posted by NONKINSENSE @ 1:09 AM //

1. Some folks look for answers, others look for fights. Some folks up in tree tops, just looking for their kites. I can tell your future, whoa just look what's in your hand. I can't stop for nothing, I'm just playing in the band.... 1- I was born in a desert, raised in a lion's den. 2- Last leaf fallen, bare earth where green was born. 3- Than walk this world when you're born to fly. 4-Speaks his name, though you were born to me; born to me 5- There is no fear that lovers born will ever fail to meet. 6- Something new is waiting to be born.

 #  posted by NONKINSENSE @ 12:48 AM //