[A2k] Guitar instruction sites shut down by music industry

[Michelle Childs]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/08/29/guitar_sites_under_fire/

Guitar instruction sites shut down by music industry
When does learning become copyright infringement?

By OUT-LAW.COM
Published Tuesday 29th August 2006 08:32 GMTGet

Music publishers are taking action against guitar fan websites which they
say infringe songwriters' copyrights. Publishers have started to use
copyright lawsuits to shut down sites which share notations to help
musicians to play songs at home.

Called guitar tablature, or tab, the notations indicate where players
should put their fingers. Books filled with tab are available in shops,
but a number of websites make tab notations available for free. Now trade
bodies are taking action against those sites.

 The New York Times reports that the Music Publishers' Association (MPA)
and the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) have shut down
several websites or forced them to remove all tabs using threats of
copyright lawsuits. The sites are typically fan-run and not significant
profit-making enterprises.

Some of the tab notations are copied from paid-for books, but most of them
are worked out by players just from listening to performances of songs.
Some legal commentators in the US suggest that tabs generated by users may
have free speech protection.

"People can get [tab] for free on the internet, and it's hurting the
songwriters," MPA president Lauren Keiser told the New York Times. The
trade associations represent publishers, who share royalties from tab book
sales with the composers of the material.

Many of the websites that publish tabs are online communities rather than
businesses and claim that much of the music involved would never have tabs
created commercially, since only the most popular material is published in
tab books.

"The company which owns this website has been indirectly threatened 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," said a statement at one of
these sites, Guitar Tab Universe, from its manager Rob Balch.

"At what point does describing how one plays a song on guitar become an
issue of copyright infringement? This website, among other things, helps
users teach each other 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."

Publishers argue that copyright legislation protects the tablature because
they are "derivative works" of the original songs, which means they enjoy
the same protection. So far, none of the sites has fought the orders to
stop publishing the tabs.

"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?" Balch said in his statement. "If
he/she calls you later that night on the phone or emails you and you
respond via one of those methods, are you infringing? I don't know."

Copyright =A9 2006, OUT-LAW.com

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