The furore over lyrics sites, which seemed to have died down of late, has returned with a US-style ’surge’. The Music Publishers’ Association was the group previously responsible for the attack on the sites, which apparently infringed copyright; its happy-go-lucky president, Lauren Keiser, wanted the pages shut down, and for the owners and, just to compound matters, for webmasters to get some “jail time”.
Recently, the National Music Publishers’ Association (NMPA) has taken the torch and has “quietly stepped up” efforts to shut down popular lyrics sites. The sites it is after are those publishing many lyrics without its members’ permission to do so. The NMPA goes one further, though, and will be demanding that search engines such as Google and Yahoo! remove results to the sites in their search results:
“Under DMCA regs, search engines are vulnerable to lawsuits for linking to sites hosting unauthorized works. Publishing sources say the NMPA has been talking to Google and other search engines about removing illegal lyrics sites from search indices.”
Coincidentally (and in no way linked, we’re sure), the publishers making up the NMPA are introducing official sites providing song lyrics via centralised repositories, such as Yahoo! Music, Rhapsody, and through deals with others that will pay for the use of the official lyrics.
Once again its clear that it is the publishers’ greed that is fuelling the war against music lovers. Not P2P downloads, nor pirated tracks, but simple honest lyrics. It’s the fans of the songs that want to see the lyrics – and obviously they’ve either purchased the song or obtained it through some other means anyway, and knowing the lyrics is unlikely provide a substitute for the music – and they are being punished by the publishers. We reckon that the song’s artists themselves would actively encourage the distribution of their lyrics.
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