I just read an interesting article about the Warner/Chappell Music Limited issuing a cease & desist order to PearLyrics, an app that searched the web for lyrics to songs playing on iTunes. It didn’t have a back-end database of lyrics that users could search: it merely found them for the user by searching known lyrics sites on the web. As lyrics are copyrighted, the Warner lawyers issued the complaint based on the idea that the application was aiding in lyrical piracy by locating lyrics similar to the way peer to peer sharing apps aid music piracy.

The guy doesn’t have the resources to fight a lawsuit for an application that he wrote for free, so he complied with the order and took his app offline.

If everything published on the web is copyrighted once it is published to a public web server, then my question is: When a search engine like google spiders my site and picks up all this incredibly well-written, copyrighted material and provides it to anyone who cares to search for it, aren’t they then aiding people in copyright infringement the same way that pearLyrics was?

Every time a search engine caches one of my pages, aren’t they infringing on my copyright by copying my pages? Doesn’t every computer on the net and, in turn, the internet’s servers themselves, have the capability of creating a copy of this page, which violates my sole, irrefutable copyright to this work? If the Warner lawyers are correct in their assumptions, maybe we can assume that they are.

And if it were possible or advisable to enforce my copyright to this site, I’d be, how you say, offline. I’d have the only copy of this material, and you’d never read it. Even if I could figure out how to get you to read this page with a single, non-downloadble copy on the web, you’d never find it, anyway. If caches were illegal copyright infringements, all search engines would be out of business, not just the ones that are convenient and cost-efficient to bully. Then, the internet could go back to the way I remember it back in the early 90’s.

If you’re old enough to remember dialing into bulletin boards or not being able to find a single fucking thing on the internet because you had to remember if it was on the world wide web, gopher, or some private bulletin board, you are aware of what a blessing search engines have become in recent history. If not, you might remember having to search 5 different engines because they all worked differently and cached different information. If you don’t remember any of this, you’re either not old enough, not nerdy enough, or just plain lucky.

If these lawyers want to get copyrighted lyrics off of the internet, they should seek to take down the illegal lyrics servers rather than make bogus claims about the legality of searching for information on the net. If they really want to control the flow of information rather than the information itself, then they need to stop bullying the little guys, grow some nuts, and sue Google for caching lyrics sites. I’d like to see how far they get with that one.

Fuckers.

Not to sidetrack, but do people really think there is an original thought left in the world that they really can claim that no one else has said it before? Is information so unquestionably original that a dead person has more of a right to copy a work than someone that outlives them? How can the dead have more rights than the living? It’s getting to the point where copyright is as rotten as the corpses that it serves.

Posted in Anger, Music