I thought this was a joke at first however i was wrong
The music industry is to extend its copyright war by taking legal action against websites offering unlicensed song scores and lyrics.
The Music Publishers’ Association (MPA), which represents US sheet music companies, will launch its first campaign against such sites in 2006.
MPA president Lauren Keiser said he wanted site owners to be jailed.
Guitar licks and song scores are widely available on the internet but are “completely illegal”, he told the BBC.
Mr Keiser said he did not just want to shut websites and impose fines, saying if authorities can “throw in some jail time I think we’ll be a little more effective”.
Bitter battles
The move comes after several years of bitter legal battles against unauthorised services allowing users to download recordings for free.
Publishing companies have taken action against websites in the past, but this will be the first co-ordinated legal campaign by the MPA.
The MPA would target “very big sites that people would think are legitimate and very, very popular”, Mr Keiser said.
“The Xerox machine was the big usurper of our potential income,” he said. “But now the internet is taking more of a bite out of sheet music and printed music sales so we’re taking a more proactive stance.”
“Unauthorised use of lyrics and tablature deprives the songwriter of the ability to make a living, and is no different than stealing,” he said.
(Really hmm… so thats why people buy instruments then! so they dont have to buy any more cd’s they can simply record themselves playing the track and listen to it for free!)
“Music publishers and songwriters will consider all tools under the law to stop this illegal behaviour.”
The campaign comes after lyric-finding software PearLyrics was forced off the internet by a leading music publishing company, Warner Chappell.
‘No alternative’
PearLyrics worked with Apple’s iTunes, searching the internet to find lyrics for songs in a user’s collection.
“I just don’t see why PearLyrics should infringe the copyright of Warner Chappell because all I’m doing is searching publicly-available websites,” PearLyrics developer Walter Ritter said.
"It would be different if they had an alternative service that also provided lyrics online and also integrated [with iTunes] like PearLyrics did.
“But they don’t offer anything like that at all.”
Warner Chappell were unavailable for comment.
The fact is alot if not all of these so called “official” tablature books are often a load of rubbish, take this example, it may say the chord is a G ok fair enough however there are many ways to play the G chord on a guitar and many variations of the G chord all with a slightly different sound, now i play the guitar and have used online tablature websites for years and they often (depending on the popularity of the song) have quite a few different versions by different people, the reason for this is that that you can either listen to the song and guess or as some people do scour live footage and actually see how the artist is playing it, Hendrix for example used to use his thumb aswell as his fingers, some artists have also been known to change the way they play the song, the official books simply cannot replace tab sites, jailing people for posting tabs or running a tab site is well… you might aswell jail karaoke singers
