Forum Moderators: not2easy
Demaestro said: I am NOT SAYING that [certain written works] are not protected under copyright law....What I am saying is that prosecuting...people for [violating the authors' copyrights] is stupid....
Kindly please clarify. Thank you.
Eliz.
Do I detect a mixing of Morality and Law in this thread? The two should never ever be connected.
In fact when it comes to case law, as opposed to statute, morality is a very important part. The court rules in the United States are also written to try and force everyone to be fair and honest.
Most judges want to do the right thing. They hate to see slimeballs win. If they can come up with any justification, they will try to rule in favor of the party that is on better moral ground.
Caselaw is where fair use comes from. The courts defined it due to the conflict between copyright law and free speech issues. It took congess 120+ years to codify it into the US Code. It was a morality play on the part of the courts.
As I understand, Law in the UK and, I think, in the USA is based on Case Law e.g. precedent. Any lawyer will quote precedence to put forward his/her argument to the court. So, to argue that user interpretations of lyrics/tabs are a breach of copyright, you simply have to quote previous judgements.
A likely case that would be cited here in the use would be the Los Angeles Times v. Free Republic [law.uh.edu].
In that case, members of the Free Republic posted current news articles and then discussed the articles in question. The Free Republic claimed fair use because they were non-commercial and that their editorial commenting on the articles represented fair use. The judge ruled against the Free Republic finding that the verbatim copying of articles was more than was necessary to further defendants' critical purpose.
Basically there is little transformative about copying the entirety or large portions of a work verbatim and one doesn't need to copy a work in its entirety to comment on or discuss a work.
Basically there is little transformative about copying the entirety or large portions of a work verbatim and one doesn't need to copy a work in its entirety to comment on or discuss a work.
There are also plenty of cases that allowed copying of 100% of a work. But you cannot publish the entire work simply for your own convenience, there must be a VERY good reason to publish the entire work.
As you point out, the transformative nature of the commenting can also have an effect. If you publish the entire work, one section at a time, with commentary on each section intersperced, you will be in much better shape legally.
In general, you are correct. It takes some extraordinary circumstances for the courts to allow a claim of Fair Use on 100% of a work.
I mentioned the Tab sites because the tabulature of songs is nearly always inaccurate and obviously not copied from anywhere official. I have a few songbooks of my own songs and my versions of some other people's songs. What if I published those songbooks on the web? Or submitted those transcriptions/lyrics to existing sites? I don't think that aspect has been tested in a court.
I don't think that aspect has been tested in a court.
Yes, it has. It is called a derivative work and is covered by statute. I believe that it was added in 1907, but I'm not sure.
Basically, you have a copyright on your changes, but the original copyright is still controlling. Neither you or the original copyright holder can publish your derived work without the permission of the other.
But there is a huge number of bands who want to be heard and talked about. They will win against the Industry money grabber accountants.
But there is a huge number of bands who want to be heard and talked about.
Yeah, I stick with non-RIAA musicians, with the added bonus that their music is usually better than the formula garbage that comes from the industry.
I think the point I was trying to make was that these websites may be publishing user's interpretations of lyrics and not direct copies of the lyrics from the sheet music (although the sheet music if often not what the artist actually wrote). Maybe that makes it different.
If you read through some of the sources I have provided throughout this thread, you will see that this does not matter. Interpretations/translations are not considered transformative from a fair use/dealings standpoint.
Yes, it has. It is called a derivative work and is covered by statute. I believe that it was added in 1907, but I'm not sure.Basically, you have a copyright on your changes, but the original copyright is still controlling. Neither you or the original copyright holder can publish your derived work without the permission of the other.
Yeah, I stick with non-RIAA musicians, with the added bonus that their music is usually better than the formula garbage that comes from the industry.
I don't have an iPod or MP3 player and much prefer real CDs (I don't even burn personal "playlists" of my own CDs I have purchased). I rarely; however, buy CDs any more as I don't have any interest in listening to the music being produced. When I do buy a CD, I have a $1 rule; I won't buy a CD unless it costs less than $1 per song on the CD.
I'm sorry, but music labels want too much money for CDs with too few songs that aren't worth listening to anyways. I think their greed and lack of quality is hurting the music industry more than piracy (although this is a problem).
So copyright laws are great, but they shouldn't be enforced...? What then is the point of them?Kindly please clarify. Thank you.
Eliz.
Rather then me explaining why I think that an archive is a benfit to the population of the planet.... again.. Why don't you explain why allowing an song archive equates not enforcing copyright laws.
You see no benfit in having an archive of the lyrics of all the songs in history? Can you explain why you feel that it would be better to staunchly enforce copyright law then to allow certain provisions to have centralized information available to the public?
If you needed the lyrics to a song where would you look? What if the band you are looking up is long since passed and has no website? Would you be happy that someone who is a fan set up a fan website and provided the lyrics to you? Or would you be appaulled that someone who claims to be a fan of the band would "STEAL" from the people who inherited the copyrights to all their material? I would you be greatful that someone had taken the time to provide the fans with song lyrics. What reaction would you have?
Kindly Please clarify, and don't quote my post if you are going to change words to try to reenforce your point. Thank-you
Demaestro
[edited by: Demaestro at 3:40 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2006]
Do I detect a mixing of Morality and Law in this thread? The two should never ever be connected.
I know that Dave touched on this but I wanted to mention that the intent of someone has great weight in law.
While intent and morality are not the same, someone with good morals and intent is treated in law much differently then someone with no morals and vicious intent. Many of the laws today even have varying degrees of charges where intent is the desiding factor. (Read 1st degree murder vs 3rd degree)
If my intent is to provide the public with a public archive and to not profit then I will be treated differently then someone who is charging a fee to download a copy of someone else's lyrics.
In my opinion, my desire to serve the public intrest over profitting would reduce any penalty that I would occur, and may even result in it being deemed that yes a song lyric archive has public value and that the damages done to the copyright holder is nil.
[edited by: Demaestro at 4:13 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2006]
that the damages done to the copyright holder is nil.
They will never have that as a determination. By providing the lyrics for free, you are reducing the ability of the copyright holder to sell his work in the form of sheet music.
There is a difference between creating an archive that contains all the songs in the world for people to come look at, and sharing that archive in a way that distribues copies.
You are right that your financial motive will be taken into account, but that alone is not sufficient to keep you from getting a pretty hefty judgement against you.
There is a valid question about whether you are allowed to create that archive. In my opinion, you probably can. There is no question at all that you are not allowed to to openly publish any copyrighted material in that archive.
Rather then me explaining why I think that an archive is a benfit to the population of the planet.... again.. Why don't you explain why allowing an song archive equates not enforcing copyright laws.You see no benfit in having an archive of the lyrics of all the songs in history? Can you explain why you feel that it would be better to staunchly enforce copyright law then to allow certain provisions to have centralized information available to the public?
Copyright law understands that granting exclusive control of a work to its creator is a greater benefit to society in the long run, because it helps foster and encourage the creation of more works.
The answer is simple. The rights of the individual copyright owner outweigh the short term benefits to the general population. This is a fundemental principle of copyright law. Based on your premise, Google News should be able to republish entire news articles in one central place rather than linking to articles on their respective websites as this would be of a benefit to the population.
Not a simple answer... That type of blanket statement brings up so many problems in our society.
And don't bring up Google after ignoring my Google examples. Google has 100s of 1000s of entire news articles posted on it's website to read without going to the original page so don't even start with Google.
Click the cache link next to any result and you are now looking at original copyrighted content being display from Google's servers. Including all the song lyrics that appear illegally on the web. So why can they do this and I can't?
Not a simple answer... That type of blanket statement brings up so many problems in our society.
The balance to creator's exclusive right is the fact that it expires after a specific period of time and the work becomes public domain after that point in time.
This of course brings a different question, which is how long those rights should last. A patent is only valid for 25 years, but a copyright is valid for something like the lifetime of the creator plus (or 75 years for a corporate entity) and this period of time keeps getting extended. Even as a copyright owner, I'm beginning to think that the exclusivity provided by copyrights might be getting too long. This line of questioning; however, is beyond the scope of this thread.
And don't bring up Google after ignoring my Google examples. Google has 100s of 1000s of entire news articles posted on it's website to read without going to the original page so don't even start with Google.
One big difference between creating websites of song lyrics archives and Google's "noarchive" option is that there is plenty of case law that establishes why the complete archiving of the lyrics of a song is not protected under fair use; however, I doubt there is any case law that establishes the validity of the "noarchive" option as a fair use defense.
My example using Google News was a prefect example of what you were suggesting and why your line of reasoning is failed logic. It is very evident that if Google News stored copies of news articles on their servers for the convenience of their readers it would directly harm the creators of those news articles especially if the articles could only be accessed via a paid subscription (e.g. the Wall Street Journal). Again, the exclusive rights granted to the creator of a work is necessary in order to spur the creation of works by helping to ensure that the creator of a work has a reasonable hope of earning a fair return on the efforts they took to create said works.
The broad definition of fair use that you would like to apply would remove much of the protections the creator of a work has and would allow those who played no part in the creation of the work to profit from said work by creating competing copies of said work. This in turn would reduce the value the copyright owners could realize from their efforts, which would thus reduce the incentives to create new works.
In regards to your argument strategies in this thread: in a court of law, the burden of proof is on the defendant who is claiming fair use/dealings protection, not on the copyright holder. Yet in this discussion you are continually trying to turn this principle on its head by failing to provide any substantial evidence to back up your claims that TAB sites fall under fair use/dealings protections. At the same time plenty of links, evidence and reasoning has been provided that shows that creating lyric archive sites do not fall under fair use protections and violate the rights of the copyright owner.
Instead of trying to dismiss the evidence against song lyrics sites using flimsy arguments, why not try to build up your case by citing court cases and legal interpretations that support your claims as I have done.
[edited by: KenB at 7:39 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2006]
I did not ignore your examples. As I pointed out the copyright owner still has control over whether or not their material shows up in the Google cache. Is opting out of the Google cache ideal? No it isn't; however, it is done via an "industry standard" method (e.g. <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">) that is used by any legitimate search engine that employs some sort of page caching. Does Google's use of cached pages pass the fair use test since they respect the "noarchive" option? I do not know; however, since the "noarchive" option exists and it works as advertised, I use it and see no personal need to challenge Google's caching tactics. If you would like to create some case law on that issue, be my guest, I'd love to see the outcome.
So when Google crawls a page that has illegally placed copyrighten song lyrics on it, and then crawls it, and caches it, and makes it available on it's website, along with ad, sponsored links, you are telling me that they requested from the copyright holder permissions to post the lyrics, in full..... They clearly didn't, but you are suggesting that just because someone who had posted it without permission didn't have a no cache entry, that somehow this equals Google asking the copyright holder permission to have it in the Google archive..... You are assuming that the copyright holder is in control of the page that was cached.
The rest of you Google arguments are reasonable and I agree with, you sight reasons why an archive is good for the general population and the copyright holders who's work has been copied. This is what I am saying.
So I will ask again, why is it good when Google creates a large archive of copyright works without requesting expressed permission from each of the copyright holders, but it is bad when I want to?........ And when answering please don't use the assumtion that the works Google has copied to it's cache it got from crawling the copyright holder's website.
[edited by: Demaestro at 8:09 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2006]
Instead of trying to dismiss the evidence against song lyrics sites using flimsy arguments, why not try to build up your case by citing court cases and legal interpretations that support your claims as I have done
I am not dismissing evidence. I am saying the laws you are quoting and the extent to which they punish people are crossing the line and are starting to breach on some of my rights as a consumer.
So when Google crawls a page that has illegally placed copyrighten song lyrics on it, and then crawls it, and caches it, and makes it available on it's website, along with ad, sponsored links, you are telling me that they requested from the copyright holder permissions to post the lyrics, in full..... They clearly didn't, but you are suggesting that just because someone who had posted it without permission didn't have a no cache entry, that somehow this equals Google asking the copyright holder permission to have it in the Google archive..... You are assuming that the copyright holder is in control of the page that was cached.
Google DOES NOT put ads or sponsored links on a cached version of a page. You really need to chack your facts before you spout off on it like that.
You should also check out Google's reasoning for their serving up a cached copy as they presented it in court. If you are able to use the same arguments when you serve up copyrighted content, you have a decent chance of prevailing, just as they did. But don't tray and apply something like that to a website serving up the content as the origninating source, as you are suggesting.
I am not dismissing evidence. I am saying the laws you are quoting and the extent to which they punish people are crossing the line and are starting to breach on some of my rights as a consumer.
No, they are not.
You, as a consumer have personal use rights. That is it. You have the right to *USE* what you buy, but you do not have distribution rights. Basically, your right as a consumer comes down to the "First sale doctrine". I suggest you look it up to find out what your rights as a consumer are.
We the public, have Fair Use rights. Fair use is not a consumer right, but retained distribution rights where copyright clashes with the First Amendment free speech rights. As the First amendment superceeds the copyright clause, copyright law must not interfere with protected forms of speech.
There are some additional rights for educational purposes, libraries and archives (real archives, not websites that distribute) but you don't qualify for any of those. Even there, the law is more about restrictions than freedoms.
I do agree that congress has gone too far with the copyright laws, but not in the areas that you seem to think they have. I do not believe that life plus 75 years is what the framers had in mind when they used the term "limited time". Personally I think 14 years plus the ability to renew for 14 more years is more than fair, and is just as likely to have the effect of encouraging the production of creative works.
stapel asked: So copyright laws are great, but they shouldn't be enforced...? What then is the point of them? Kindly please clarify. Thank you.
Demaestro answered: Rather then me explaining [my position].... again.. Why don't you explain why [I'm wrong].
You appear to have decided that the rules should be changed, or at least not respected if they inconvenience you. You appear to want to overthrow a system that has benefitted many and which most agree is good, or at least quite useful; a system which has been justified many times throughout history, not to mention within this forum; a system which, when not respected, has resulted in very definable harm.
You want the change; you need to justify that change.
Demaestro said: You see no benfit in having an archive of the lyrics of all the songs in history?
And then please return to the subject at hand: You've said that copyrights that you find inconvenient should not be enforced, that enforcement is "stupid". Kindly please justify your position.
Thank you.
Eliz.
They don't have the ads on the cached page, no what I meant was that they have ads and sponsored links around the results page and the cached link.
Without them having indexed the content which is most likely not rfrom the copyright holder then there would be no results to display.
On their SERP they have a link that is they are telling me is the lyrics of the song I want. A link that points to the entire works of the song also on the Google servers.
While the ads and sponsored links do not appear with the copyrighten content they are all over the access link Google gives me to get to said copywitten content. A link that points to the offending content on their server.
I have seen their reasoning and I have to admit the read is a little advanced for me but from what I can gather they basically claim they are not responisble for the content on their own site. I may be mis-interpreting that though but that is what I was able to gleen from it.
I wish I could make the same claim, that I am not responsible for content on my own site, and put the onus on copyright holders to request to have offending content removed rather then the standard of having to request the right to republish said works.
Like I said before the Google model puts the system on it's ear as in the Google world it is up to the copyright holder to request that their original works be removed.
I feel that because of the Google model that has been argued and allowed... that as long as I too put a disclaimer saying I am not responsible for the content on my site, and give copyright holders a way to request to have their content removed, respect such requests, then I should be fine.
Trust me I will respond to any emails faster then G.
1) If I purchase a cd with songs on it then I as a consumer am entitled to the lyrics. If they are not available to me from the copyright holder of the song then I should be able to get them from a central look up. How many times should a consumer pay for the same thing? If I buy the song aren't I entitled to the lyrics without paying more?
2) If I want to teach children in a school a song from my childhood then I should be able to print off the lyrics and teach them without being in vioaltion of anything in law. I should also be able to do this without purchsing extra materials beyond what limited school budgets would allow.
3) Song lyrics are only a part of a entire peice of work, while they are the original pieces of work, they are still only a piece. A peice I feel should be available.
You mentioned that you can't find mention of anyone saying that all writing produced in "all of history" are copyrighten, and you are right they aren't but unfortunatly for us now copyrights expiring and coming into the public domain is not happening as big corps. keep extending the coptrights definition to keep works out of the public domain. So all those old works that you are thinking of that we are grateful are in the public domain won't happen for our children when it comes to the new works we enjoy today.
I feel that this is wrong and us individuals need to fight a little. As someone said already the rights of a copyright holder outweigh the rights of the individual. That scares me that someone would say that and be happy that this is how it works.
So while I don't want to endorse violating copyright law any more than I want to endorse violating any law, I do endorse getting copyright law modified to benefit society more fully- or at least getting people to use copyright law in a more beneficial manner (eg Creative Commons), unfortunatly the best way to do that IN MY OPINION is to be taking to court and fight my case there, winning a judgement would start a precedence that could be built on.
So when Google crawls a page that has illegally placed copyrighten song lyrics on it, and then crawls it, and caches it, and makes it available on it's website, along with ad, sponsored links, you are telling me that they requested from the copyright holder permissions to post the lyrics, in full.....
Google may very well be on shaky legal ground on their caching of pages in the example you used; however, most people are satisfied with simply filing a take down notice with Google and drop their issues once the offending pages have been removed from Google's cache. In most instances, it just isn't worth the time or expense involved in pressing a legal case against Google's caching practices once Google has complied with the initial take down notice. Pressing this matter would be a very interesting legal exercise and some very interesting case law might come from such a case, however, one would have to have a lot of spare cash lying around to pursue such a case. The RIAA; however, would look at a song lyrics site as an easy target and would be more than happy to spend more money on a legal case than they could realistically get in the end just to make an example out of the owner of such a site.
Oh it should be noted that when Google displays a page in their cache, the only modification they make to the page is to add a disclaimer to the top of the page. The only ads on the page are the ads that were originally put on the page by whom ever created/maintained the original page.
They clearly didn't, but you are suggesting that just because someone who had posted it without permission didn't have a no cache entry, that somehow this equals Google asking the copyright holder permission to have it in the Google archive..... You are assuming that the copyright holder is in control of the page that was cached.
What Google is serving is a temporary copy. Google has been very careful when it comes to EVERYTHING about how they present those cached pages, to be able to meet the requirement. Even there, they are walking a very precarious line. You on the other hand, seem to want the requirements to expand to allow you to do wnatever you want.
Google cannot take a copyrighted work from my website and serve it up as a static page in their webmaster guidelines. They cannot claim that they are "not responsible" for that. Neither can you if you copy it onto your own site.
If you are unwilling or unable to understand the legal arguments, you best not make some of the claims that you put out there.
Google's caching has been tested by a rather clueless lawyer in Nevada. He tried to trap Google by putting up a bunch of crap pages of gibberish. He admitted to knowledge of robots.txt and intentionally did not use it in the hopes of entrapping Google.
Aside from all the copyright issues, the case would have had to be thrown out because of all sorts of estoppel issues.
But the ruling included decisions in Google's favor on the copyright issues related to caching, including that fact that there are industry standards to opt-out.
So, it is only a district sourt (no appeal that I am aware of) in Nevada, but it is still caselaw, and it is in Google's favor.
That is why you want a really good case to set a precident. This case was so contrived that it really hurt any future case that might be more legitimate.
But either way, the case has no bearing whatsoever on what demaestro is suggesting.
There are so many judgements for them out there it is hard to go through them all.
There was a Nevada one, the use-net one, Google images, and so on.
I do not want the requirements to expand to allow me to do whatever I want, I just want to have the same rights as Google. The only reason the requirments exist as far as I can tell is that Google went to court and faught to have those requirements defined.
I am willing to understand and and I am able, I just don't see why people get all hairy when I say we need to relax the laws and challenge some of them.
Ok here is the example I am thinking of.
Goto Google, search the following, include double quotes:
lyrics "today is going to be the day"
Now click the cached link on the top result. Google has a page that is on their server with the entire lyrics and notes for this song.
How/why is this allowed? More specifically how or why isn't this a violation of the copyright act?
[edited by: Demaestro at 10:58 pm (utc) on Aug. 28, 2006]
I am willing to understand and and I am able, I just don't see why people get all hairy when I say we need to relax the laws and challenge some of them.
Without tough copyright protections, I would not be able to produce much of the original content I produce because I depend on the exclusive rights I enjoy to the content to recoup my investment in time and money. Every copy of one of my articles that appears on a website other than my own is not only competing against me in the SERPs, but is also a potential duplicate content penalty that could harm my site.
While it may appear that groups like the RIAA are abusing the DMCA, it is the DMCA that gives me a half fair chance to protect my copyrights without going broke.
I just want to have the same rights as Google.
You do have the same rights as Google. Create a search engine that follows robots.txt and meta robots. Provide a PROMINENT link to the originating site in your SERPs. Include a small link to your cached copy at the bottom of the SERP.
On that cached copy, make it clear that it is not your content. Other than your disclaimer, add nothing to the page. Don't even modify the formatting.
Do not have a human involved in the crawling process. For that matter, don't be picky about what you crawl. If you are only crawling pages with certain types of content, you will change the legal dynamics.
Make sure that your cache expiers afer a certain duration. It is a cache after all and is *temporary*.
Be prepared to get sued, because the precident is not binding. Google is certainly ready to get sued.
There you go. Just follow those steps and you will have the same rights to display that work as Google does.
The only reason the requirments exist as far as I can tell is that Google went to court and faught to have those requirements defined.
No they did not. The rights were were written in the DMCA before Google existed. The court case just verified that the DMCA provisions applied to them.
Feel free to get sued and go to court and tell them that they apply to you as well. Just be sure that you actually meet the requirements.
Ok here is the example I am thinking of.
We all understand your example, without bothering to even check it out.
The point is that Google Search qualifies as a sort of common carrier like your ISP or the phone company. Their job is as a fully automated information pipeline, not an information source.
You want to be a selective human information source.
Do you understand the difference?
There are some additional rights for educational purposes, libraries and archives (real archives, not websites that distribute) but you don't qualify for any of those. Even there, the law is more about restrictions than freedoms.
You mentioned that you can't find mention of anyone saying that all writing produced in "all of history" are copyrighten, and you are right they aren't but unfortunatly for us now copyrights expiring and coming into the public domain is not happening as big corps. keep extending the coptrights definition to keep works out of the public domain. So all those old works that you are thinking of that we are grateful are in the public domain won't happen for our children when it comes to the new works we enjoy today.
With that said, maybe the solution to the length of copyrights would be to rein them in from their current length to 75 years from the date of creation or the life of the creator (if they retain the rights), which ever is longer. I agree that the length of time a copyright is valid should not be indefinite.
@BigDave,
Your last post was very good.
[edited by: KenB at 1:14 am (utc) on Aug. 29, 2006]
