Industry tries to stop guitarists from clicking and picking their music online
Music publishers take down tablature websites
STEVE CAREY THE MARTLET (UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA)
VICTORIA (CUP) — Remember when you worked out the finger picking to that Johnny Cash song, wrote it on a napkin and then emailed it to your friend? Turns out, that’s illegal.
Tablature is a text representation of music that shows notes by string and fret. Several high-profile online tab archives recently received letters threatening legal action from the Music Publishers' Association (MPA) and the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) of America.
A common feature of tab sites is a disclaimer that explains that the tabs are not for sale and are provided only for private study and educational purposes. Since no money changes hands and no one is selling the music as their own, site operators assumed that they weren’t breaking any laws.
Not so. According to U.S. copyright law, the right to make and distribute arrangements, adaptations, abridgments, or transcriptions is the exclusive property of the copyright holder. This means that the MPA and the NMPA are well within their rights to ask that the tab websites be taken down and the offending material be removed.
Sites in question are the volunteerrun Online Guitar Archive (olga. net) and Ultimate Guitar Archive (guitartabs.cc). The NMPA and MPA have yet to sue infringers, instead opting to use the take down provisions in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act to threaten without suit.
That’s pretty nice of the lawyers. After all, they could just sue the adrevenue- just-barely-keeps-us-afloat tab site operators, pecking away at them in court until the legal fees bankrupt them. The lawyers’ letters use phrases like “good faith,” “penalty of perjury,” and “demand,” but should really say “or else.”
It’s a case of technology being ahead of the music industry’s business model. In a statement to the New York Times, an MPA spokesperson estimated that a single guitar tab could cost $800 per song to produce, license, and format for downloading.
What a lack of forward thinking. Anyone who can play a song can write a tab, from a monkey with an accordion to the fattest racehorse in the world.
Learning a song from a tab is as much of a burden as it is a boon: there aren’t standards built into the format, time signatures are hard to represent, common chords go unlisted and they’re riddled with mistakes.
After many failures, a music publisher-sanctioned solution to distribute electronic sheet music and tabs will be developed. The artist will then have control of their music and get the revenue they deserve from the sales or licensing of their songs. Perhaps they’ll distribute them through their MySpace websites, a method that most artists have embraced to communicate with their fans.
How has this affected the guitar player? There’s no way the music publishing industry can seamlessly fill the gap they created by taking down these archives.
They can provide all the Bob Dylan tabs in the world in book form, but for obscure songs or classics the tech-savvy guitarist will tirelessly search the same way as they do now: via news groups, message boards, or lower-profile websites.
The regulation of electronic sheet music is just another step in the commercialization of the Internet, but that won’t stop guitarists from picking and clicking their music online.
