Posted on 06/04/2007 6:49:17 AM PDT by TChris
Music publishers are stepping up their campaign to remove guitar tablature from the Net. Recently Guitartabs.com received a nastygram from lawyers for the National Music Publishers Association and The Music Publishers Association of America. These organizations want to stretch the definition of their intellectual property to include by-ear transcriptions of music. Guitartabs.com is currently not offering tablature while the owner evaluates his legal options.
Already being done. Check out Happy Birthday To You © ^ 'owned' by Time-Warner.
Well at least it used to be.
Personally, I would be flattered if someone else wanted to imitate my playing style. But that is highly unlikely.
The RIAA never seemed to care when the record companies sold us:
1. LPs that were virtually impossible to keep clean
2. 8-Tracks that were horrible in quality and would break songs in half if it was close to the end of a program
3. Cassette tapes that squealed when you played them
4. CDs that were marketed as skip-proof, but sure did skip when a scratch happened
Now they want to tell us that downloading a rough tab is illegal. They need to give it a break...
It sounds like a derivative work.
Except for simple chord progressions that are common to many songs (certain blues progressions, for instance), and thus not original, it seems like a clear case of copyright infringement.
You are talking about different issues.
Either the bars where they play are paying ASCAP and BMI fees, which is not unusual for places that regularly book live bands, or they've been lucky enough not to get caught.
Steely Dan proved just how bad tabs are. When they reformed for the Citizen tour neither Don or Walter could find their original sheets so they went out and bought a bunch of tabs, started playing them and got a definite “that ain’t right” feeling, wrong rhythms wrong keys wrong everything. So then they went and got copies of the albums and did their own tabbing.
That's just how my youngest son has taught himself to play guitar. He has no formal music training, yet he gives a pretty decent performance. He certainly has a good sense of rhythm and the manual dexterity.
I purchased many music books when I was young. Most of it was written for the trumpet so I could play works from Herb Alpert or Chicago. There wasn't an internet in those days.
There's probably a more precise legal definition, but pretty much anything big enough to get noticed. An impromptu bonfire on the beach is unlikely to attract any attention. But a summer camp, where parents pay to send their kids -- and campfire sing-alongs are part of the experience they're paying for -- is a whole 'nother thing.
The Boy and Girl scouts have dodged this by putting together official songbooks of original and public-domain material, and some summer camps do the same -- my sister always used to come home from camp having learned a lot of new songs unfamiliar to anyone who didn't go to that camp.
And the author will not see the royalties. The collection agency will collect them by pressuring establishments to pay a seasonal protection fee, but it offers them blanket protection and does not require a logging of the actual songs, writers, or publishers involved.
So if you pay BMI or ASCAP, your bar is protected if any musician covers their material or if someone plays a CD of their protected songs. But none of that money BMI or ASCAP collected will go to the artist because they do not have a record of who to pay it to.
ASCAP conducts surveys to see who's getting played, and allocates royalties accordingly in cases (like most bar bands) when no set list is provided. I assume BMI does the same. The money doesn't just disappear into a slush fund.
The RIAA has nothing to do with this. It licenses recordings, not songs.
No one's saying it is. The rights at issue are those of the songwriter, not the performer. They're not always the same people.
An interesting test case would be a transcription of, say, Jimi Hendrix's "Star Spangled Banner" -- the song itself is not protected material.
URL?
Well, wasn’t that special.
www.gprotab.net
Pretty sure that’s the Ruskie site. Its the entire archive from the old MySongBook.com site. Can be a little slow at times but as far as I know its the biggest Guitar Pro site out there. I’ve never erally had any problems with it. Works good, lasts long time.
Well, sorta. It was John Cage, and he's been dead for awhile. But that didn't stop his estate from suing a modern artist for copyright infringement when he put a similar "composition" on a CD a couple of years ago.
See here.
They're supposed to. BMI and ASCAP require yearly licence fees for playing the music of artists and composers that they represent.
And they have a pretty extensive enforcement network, too, stopping in bars, clubs and restaurants, looking for not only live acts, but places where a radio station is being played for entertainment. I've heard stories of owners of the tiniest open mic venues in the smallest of towns receiving 'cease and desist or pay up' notices.
MAN I JUST LOVE TAB MUSIC.
I HAVE BECOME A VERY GOOD PLAYER USING TABS.
DANG LAWYERS, NO WONDER EVERY ONE LAUGHS AT LAWYER
MISFORTUNE JOKES.
I was a Kiss Army brat too! I bought Double Platinum in the 4th grade.
Next in line: parodies.
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