The Butt Ugly Weblog

Yup, it's very nice. That's what I use anyway... :)

--JanneJalkanen, 08-Dec-2005

Had to point out: This time it's technically NOT the record industry who is attacking.

Warner/Chappell has nothing to do with records, they don't print them, they don't sell them... of course, being in the Warner Group of which one member does records... one can argue... but still. :-).

http://www.warnerchappell.com http://www.warnerchappell.com/wcm/wcm_help/ourhistory.jsp

And the company is no newcomer in this battlefield either: http://www.uk-piano.org/history/chappell/ Search for "William Boosey" for some interesting stuff on previous attempts to prevent illegal (=unaccounted for?) distribution of music and/or lyrics :-).

As for pearLyrics - I'm pretty surprised that they decided to CaD this one. What they should be after are the sites distributing their customers' property and imho rather than shutting those distributors down they should start collecting royalties for page views. That should be simple enough, as this is not P2P we're talking about, just plain old WWW. If the sites could not come up with the money to finance the royalties from advertisements alone then they'd have to come up with a better business model (I'd be interested in quality sheet music PDFs for a reasonable price. Maybe the lyrics could be kept free?). I suspect most of the lyrics sites in the web get little money for their efforts - just enough to buy the bandwith...

--JES, 08-Dec-2005

Point taken about Chappell not being a part of the music industry as such.

I agree, if anything, they should be talking to the lyrics sites, not the freeware people. They can't - of course - attack the big projects such as Mozilla or Google or Yahoo, because they can afford to defend themselves. Shutting down a freeware author is much, much easier.

--JanneJalkanen, 08-Dec-2005