While looking up the chords for Britney Spears’ “Hit Me Baby One More Time” on OLGA (The Online Guitar Archive), I was confronted with this:
Okay, let me back up. Yes, I was looking up chords for a Britney Spears song. I’ve been practicing an acoustic rendition of “Hit Me Baby One More Time” that I happen to think kicks some serious ass, but go ahead and sneer if you don’t share my appreciation for ironic cover songs. I can take it.
When I read the on-screen message at OLGA, my guess was that they must have gotten a cease & desist letter from the RIAA or something. Well, today on BoingBoing I read that another guitar tab site has posted a more detailed explanation of the “legal action” that has been taken against them. At Guitar Tab Universe, they put up a message on July 17th that reads in part:
The company which owns this website has been indirectly threatened (via our ISP) with legal action by the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) as well as the Music Publishers’ Association (MPA) on the basis that sharing tablature constitutes copyright infringement. At what point does describing how one plays a song on guitar become an issue of copyright infringment? This website, among other things, helps users teach eachother how they play guitar parts for many different songs. This is the way music teachers have behaved since the first music was ever created. The difference here is that the information is shared by way of a new technology: the Internet.
When you are jamming with a friend and you show him/her the chords for a song you heard on the radio, is that copyright infringement? What about if you helped him/her remember the chord progression or riff by writing it down on, say, a napkin… infringement? If he/she calls you later that night on the phone or e-mails you and you respond via one of those methods, are you infringing? I don’t know… but I would really like to know. If anyone has information on this, please email support@guitartabs.cc.
To me, this just seems stupid, because most of the tablature that you find on sites like OLGA and Guitar Tab Universe is the result of people sitting around listening to songs and fooling around on their guitars until they figure out what the chords are. Then they post them online for the benefit of people like me, who don’t have the guitar skills or the desire to figure that stuff out themselves. How does this violate anyone’s copyright? I know that it would be copyright infringement if someone photocopied pages from a published book of guitar tabs and posted them online, but if a person figures out the chords herself and shares them online, how is that copyright infringement? And how would a court or the owner of one of these sites distinguish between a tab that somebody figured out on her own and one that somebody copied down from a book?
Most of the tabs online are wrong anyway. You have to wade through a bunch of incorrect tabs until you find one that sounds accurate (at least at the sites I use). Sometimes I can’t find one that sounds exactly right, so I just pick the one that sounds closest then tweak it on my own until it sounds good to me. Once again — how could this be copyright infringement?
Also, there are lots of songs that have the same chord progressions. If someone owns the rights to a song, do they own the rights to the particular arrangement of chords that make up the song? That doesn’t seem right. And how does it violate anyone’s ownership rights if someone online posts the tab for a song and I sit at home and play it for nobody but the spiders in the corner of the room?
Despite my occupation, I don’t actually feel like doing the research on these questions (I never was interested in intellectual property law), so if anyone actually wants to attempt a legal analysis in the comments, please have at it. This just doesn’t feel like copyright infringement to me. (Yeah, that kind of argument doesn’t work in court, but I can freely make such arguments on my blog. Nyah.)
Guitar Tab Universe has a link at the end of its message to MuSATO (Music Student and Teacher Organization), which was formed to “[fight] for the freedom to fairly use tablature in online education.” Which reminds me, isn’t there an exception in copyright law for materials that are used for educational purposes only? God, I’m being a lazy lawyer today. I’m just pissed that the simple pleasure of sitting around my living room trying to learn new songs has been seriously compromised. Fuckers.
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