Music firms go after online lyric sellers
p2pnet news view Music:- Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music are on your case for sharing music.
Now Peermusic, Warner Music’s Warner/Chappell and Bug Music have launched lawsuit against two companies for alleged copyright infringement of the second kind — the unlicensed use of lyrics online.
“The lawsuits alleged that LiveUniverse, Inc. and its owner Brad Greenspan, and Motive Force LLC and its owner Sean Colombo, engaged in willful copyright infringement on a vast scale, according to the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA), a Washington, D.C.-based trade organization which issued a press release on behalf of its members participating in the lawsuit,” says Billboard.
MPA (Music Publishers` Association) president Lauren Keiser wanted sites carrying song lyrics shut down, also calling for authorities to, throw in some jail time just to make the situation thoroughly clear, said p2pnet in 2005.
The Xerox machine used to be the big usurper of our potential income, but nowadays, the internet is taking more of a bite out of sheet music and printed music sales so we`re taking a more proactive stance, the story had him saying, going on:
“Keiser`s views were made known after an application called PearLyrics, which searched for words to songs in iTunes collections, was forced offline by music publishing firm Warner Chappell.”
Now, “”Unlicensed web sites exploiting song lyrics for profit have become a significant problem,” Billboard quotes NMPA boss David Israelite (right) as stating, adding:
“These sites are profiting on the backs of songwriters. It is unfortunate that copyright holders must so frequently divert energies to protect their rights to license and distribute their works. However, the demand for music prompts a seemingly endless stream of illegal business models.”
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win ~ Mahatma Gandhi
Billboard – Publishers File Suit Against Lyric Sites, August 24, 2009
p2pnet – Lyric sites and jail time, December 14, 2005
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August 25th, 2009 at 3:04 pm
“These sites are profiting on the backs of songwriters.”
Isn’t that what everyone who’s in the music business, who is not the creator, is doing? Isn’t that what the NMPA does? Makes money off of the backs of the songwriters and then gives them a crumb from the three dozen pies they’ve acquired as “revenue” ??
Again, this isn’t about the backs of the songwriters, this is about “mine, mine, min” control!
Go back to la-la-land their NMPA! You are clearly not fit to be awake in reality. Enjoy your dream, and just remember the more you try to stop it the more it will amplify the “problem” you think you have.
August 25th, 2009 at 4:19 pm
The most disturbing part of the story is that the music industry forced PearLyrics to go offline. PearLyrics is a search application that matches songs to lyrics. The application itself does nothing to contribute to actual copyright infringement. How is this different then going into google and searching “#NAMEOFSONG lyrics”? The industry yet again hampers progress online in a copyright battle they can’t win.
August 25th, 2009 at 6:57 pm
These peoples have some seriously warped perceptions alright!.Where will it all end?.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:14 am
David Israelite is fucking idiot.
Nothing has never been more hypocritical than the music industry. I just had to laugh at the sentence, âThese sites are profiting on the backs of songwriters.”
August 26th, 2009 at 8:01 am
THE MUSIC PUBLISHER RACKET
To understand we must understand the so called music publishing racket.
a. Publishers hardly publish at all. For every 1,000 songs a publisher scams from songwriters, perhaps one is published in sheet music form.
b. Because of a above, performers may not get sheet music for the vast majority of songs. Then sonwriters wonder whytheir grat songs are not recorded while a lot of crap songs are.
c. Record companies have become the largest “publishers” by telling, over a drink or something else, the songwriter: For we to record your songs, you have to first give them to us in exchange for a small advanced payment and the royalties for the fist (and probably last recording). After that the song becomes a dead song that no one records, as record companies-publishers use new records to acquire new songs. Once a song is used it served the purpose of inflating the publisher’s song catalog and it’s share of ASCAP/BMI (who are controlled by the publishers) income.
d. Then there is the accounting of royalties. Nothing can be said of that because no one songwriter has seen any of it and those that have seen it are the insiders.
e. Then don try to get your dead songs back from a publisher because of contract non performance through a lawsuit. The publisher will hire a lawyers that knows your lawyer on a friendly basis, the case will be given to a publisher friendly judge, you will loose the case and wind up with $50,000 in legal fees expenses (yours and the publishers). In a few words, the system is rigged.
That, in a nutshell, is the MUSIC PUBLISHER RACKET.
August 26th, 2009 at 8:32 am
@Songwriter:
Don’t give anything to them anymore! Work with people who perform but can’t compose. There are many! And while there are many under the industry’s shell, there are many more outside the shell whom would love to perform your music!
If you are both realistic in royalty agreements, which when you are with industry groups you don’t need to worry about negotiating as they do it for you on their (no your) behalf, then you can write, he/she/they can perform and since club owners won’t have to pay SOCAN/ASCAP or any other BS ‘non-profit’ organization trying to get rich “off the backs of songwriters” you have all the money to yourselves!
You have the best distribution medium available, the Internet! All you need is to figure out how to get you and your performer’s stuff out there, without signing away any and all rights to some greedy prick who won’t even give your hard earned effort a chance.
The best way is slow growth via word of mouth/Skype/MSN/email. Which means you may need a second job to help pay the bills while you work on getting your music career off the ground. There’s no overnight success, but that also means there’s no overnight fade-out either!
The effort comes from you and your performer! And if you’re lucky, you can find people who are not performers or composers, but want to produce and want to market. All that matters, while this is technically a rebirth of what exists today, is that NONE of the people are allowed to become massive, corporate, greedy people.
Best of luck man! I’m still working on the writing part myself, no one listens to my myspace postings, but for some reason they read the rants which are basically re-iteration of stuff I found here or TechDirt or ArsTechnica or something similar.
August 26th, 2009 at 9:54 am
Lyric sites makes money from advertising. The music publishers would like a share, given that all the money is generated by lyrics they administer. They ask the sites to pay a licence and pursue those that don’t. No one has yet asked surfers to pay for lyrics, and I have yet to hear someone think this is a realistic option. So the end result is the same: people picking up lyrics for free. So what’s the problem? It’s one less layer of leeches on the backs of songwriters.
The ones I feel sorry for are the developers like PearLyrics. But even then, why don’t they sell their app to websites or MP3 manufacturers or whatever? There is a market for funky apps.
@songwriter As Robert says, don’t sign with publishers in the first place if you can do it yourself. The other option is to read the contracts and only sign when you think the publisher is trustworthy and the conditions are fair and there are provisions for getting the copyright back if nothing happens after a given period of time. If the song is any good, they will go for it anyway.
August 26th, 2009 at 1:23 pm
Are they going to sue every search engine when someone googles lyrics to a song? What if I post lyrics on a message board? These assbites are ready to tear up the constitution.