PearLyrics was a great little Mac OSX widget that could automatically search for song lyrics on the net and display them as you played music in iTunes. Unfortunately, the free program may have been too great. Walter Ritter, the developer, has pulled the app after receiving a cease-and-desist letter from Warner/Chappell Music. "As a freeware developer I can not afford to risk a law suit against such a big company,"
Ritter says on his site, adding that "personally I don't see where pearLyrics should infringe any copyrights handled by them. After all pearLyrics only searches and accesses publicly available websites, displays, and, at the users wish, caches its content. Something that can easily be done with any combination of search engine and webbrowser too." I'd have to agree. This looks like a case of a big label's lawyers going after a soft target after finding they can't shut down real copyright infringers. It would be great to see some group like the EFF take up Ritter's case, and it would be even better to see record companies stop harassing their customers and treating them like criminals, but I somehow suspect that's not about to happen.
Tags: freeware, news
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Comments
7
Subscribe to commentsC BDec 7th 2005 1:00PM
Warner/Chappell Music is a publisher and not a record label. The music business is crazy in many ways, but in this case, it's a result of the way the copyright law differentiates the rights in the underlying composition (ie. the notes and lyrics) from the specific recordings (which are typically owned by record labels).
You need permission from the publisher to do most things with the lyrics and the sheet music, for example, and permission from the record company if you want to use the audio from a particular artist's performance.
Marc PertonDec 7th 2005 1:29PM
Thanks for the clarification on Warner/Chappell. I think it doesn't change things, though. The lyrics are out there on the net, and all PearLyrics did was make searching for them easier. If they want to go after someone for copyright violations, they should be shutting down the sites that host the lyrics, not developers of tools that make it easier to find them.
RobertDec 7th 2005 1:50PM
If what CB says is true, you'd think Warner/Chappell would want to buy that little widget to help sniff out those that publish lyrics they own. Neither the PR or legal strategy makes any sense to me.
ResourceDec 7th 2005 2:17PM
This will definitely make me buy music now.
Without a legal lyrics program for my torrents I will go buy CDs now...
Boy the record companies have sure figured out this digital thing...
TwistDec 7th 2005 9:29PM
The have no grounds at all for a lawsuit. All he is providing is a specialized browser and search tool. If the labels want to go after someone then they need to go after the sites providing the lyrics. Of course many artists publicly publish their lyrics on their own web sites so that could lead to some interesting situations.
DylanDec 7th 2005 6:37PM
You can still use Evil Lyrics, which is about the same thing...google it to find it.
ArtDec 14th 2005 10:58AM
And for the rest of us, not living in the US? I find it very annoying so that many in the web world think that US laws apply to them, even when they are outside of the US. Efforts like this, then, need only move to places where they are legally allowed.