Guitar Tabs and the evils of the RIAA by 6ixStringJack

GENERAL DISCUSSIONS

Guitar Tabs and the evils of the RIAA

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Tuesday, September 5, 2006 19:09
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VIEWED: 1888
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Tuesday, September 5, 2006 1:31 AM

This doesn't exactly relate to Firefly as in an episode, or a character, or another BDM, but I do feel that it is very much in the spirit of Firefly. I recently posted on my MySpace blog about how my favorite guitar site MySongBook.com has recently removed all of its tabulature of copyrighted songs after being scared off by the bully lawyers from the recording industry. This has been happening to many of the great guitar sites out there as of late and it's a pretty scary thing for the aspiring musician.

Recently the axis of evil, the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) the Music Publishers Association of the United States (MPA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have shut down many guitar tab sites on the internet. I've only been playing guitar for 2 1/2 years now and I'd like to think that I'm getting pretty good at it now. I can guaranty that I wouldn't be half as good as I am now without these tabs and I probably would have lost interest very early on without them. They are an essential part of any guitarist's ability to learn music, no matter what your skill level.

Bottom line, these tabs are not official song sheets ripped directly from songbooks with a hefty price tag, but they are individual guitarist's interpretations of the songs themselves. It's somebody like you or I who have put in their time and really learned their shit and decided to make the job a little easier for the beginners and the not-so-musically-inclined. To sue these sites would be akin to suing you for copyright infringement for singing Panic at the Disco in the shower or Gnarls Barkley at your local Karaoke bar.

As I posted on my blog, I will be hosting all of my guitar tabs (100,000 + tabs) in zipfiles which I will host on Rapidshare. I will make these available to anyone who wants them for free, and I hope that my fellow browncoats will download these for themselves if they play or for any of their familys and friends to use and to pass on. I wanted to post here to see what people thought about this idea as I have a limited audience on my MySpace blog. I will be hosting these files later this week and I will update this post and my blog then.

Help me spread the gift of music. May we never be silenced!

"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack

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Tuesday, September 5, 2006 2:49 AM

DUG

Actually it is VERY much like singing Gnarl's Barkley at your local karaoke bar. If the rights fees haven't been paid it's a violation. In the bar's case it is up to the establishment to pay the fees, not the performers. If they don't pay them they get nasty problems. You're ok in your shower. Unless you shower with an audience.

I worked in the music industry too long and lost all illusions. It is almost impossible to make a living in it, and the songwriters are often at the bottom of the heap. Most pop songs aren't written by the performers, right? So how do the songwriters get paid? Largely through rights fees and publishing fees collected by groups like you mentioned.

Compare it to other things you like. If it were as easy to post some kind of tabs for a movie or tv show, would Joss ever be able to make a go at any of his projects? You're clearly passionate about music and am *NOT* saying you shouldn't have access to tabs. I would ask that you see if you can find a way to do this while supporting the people who created the music you want to play.

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Tuesday, September 5, 2006 9:20 AM

NOSADSEVEN

There's another way this relates to Firefly, 6ix. When NPR's Morning Edition did a segment on the issue, they used someone learning to play the Ballad of Serenity as their example (though, they never specified what it was he was playing).

See this thread:
http://www.fireflyfans.net/thread.asp?b=2&t=22889

Which contains this link to the segment, so you can listen:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5622879

~~~~~~~~~~~~
Ain't. We. Just.

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Tuesday, September 5, 2006 9:38 AM

DUG

And since Joss has the songwriting credits on that song he may be getting some trivial amount of royalties due to that.

No, stations do not report every song every day. You report a sampling of logs when BMI or ASCAP tell you to and they figure out how to split the moneys around all of the songwriters. In the early 90's there were a lot of smaller alt bands that should have been getting larger checks than normal due to me spiking the playlists when we were logging.

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Tuesday, September 5, 2006 10:43 AM

SIMONWHO

There's obviously been a big shift in the nature of copyright since the Internet made music sharing easy and cheap. The RIAA has been railing against those who do so, bemoaning people as thieves, breaking copyright law.

The trouble is they broke the agreement first. Copyright is a deal between consumers and producers, that the producers will own the rights to music, films, books, etc for a limited amount of time and then they are released into the public domain.

Except the media industry, through lobbying and blatant threats to any senators or politician who seemed uncompliant, has enacted a number of laws extending copyright beyond the original planned length. Jack Valenti, head of the MPAA, explained that he wanted copyright to last forever, less a day as a compromise to those who pointed out it was designed to be a limited period of time.

They broke the deal first. For those that get caught in the firing line, I'm sorry, but I really don't care if your industry gets burnt to the f***ing ground when you have leaders like that.

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Tuesday, September 5, 2006 11:10 AM

DUG

Not talking about industry or industry leaders. They are all rich bloated ticks sucking the lifeblood out of the artists. Like I said, lost all of my illusions.

The artists are the ones I mentioned. Think about Lucinda Williams. Who? The woman who wrote the Pearl Jam song "Crazy Mary." If you ever heard her sing you would never have wanted to again, but she wrote AMAZING music. Same for Vic Chesnutt. Or John Hartford, who wrote one of the most recorded songs in history and scores more country standards but couldn't sell many of his own albums. These people survive off of the royalties and fees collected from performance and sale of music including fake books and tabs.

BTW, the RIAA has been screaming about music sharing since well before the internet. They started that whinging back with cassettes and maybe even recordable 8-tracks. They've just had more success getting laws made in recent years.

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Tuesday, September 5, 2006 3:06 PM

JPSTARGAZER

Wow, I didn't know this. I use a certain tab site on a regular basis and I'd hate for it to be shut down or remove it's content.

I'm no lawyer, but I'd think that if the tab is the work of someone's effort to transcribe the song by ear and post it, that should be legal. I guess there's a question about lyrics, since there's really no interpretation on the transcriber's part. Besides, every tab I've seen (and subsequently saved to my HD) gives full credit to the artist.

If I can't go online and get tabs, I may have to visit my local Guitar Center, peek at the book, and do a little memorization. Somehow that seems worse than looking at the online tabs...oh well.

"All I got is a red guitar, three chords, and the truth...the rest is up to you"
--Bono

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Tuesday, September 5, 2006 4:50 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Thank you all for your opinions about this subject. I think there would be more discussion or a desire to have these tabs if I actually had them posted already. I have a couple of replies myself, and I want to say to Dug upfront that I’m not picking on you here with my long reply, but I’m just trying to get my point across. If we can’t see eye to eye, then we must agree to disagree as we are Browncoats and what kind of example would we be setting if we start acting like trolls? That being said……

DUG:

Songwriters also get paid from the everyday jobs they do, just like you and I, and aside from some of the larger names, it has always been this way and guitar songbooks did nothing to change this. On top of the recording industries price gouging, you’ve also now added material costs of the book and the book publishers price gouging, not to mention the price gouging that the retailer does. If MySongBook was posting net profits, then there would indeed be a problem here, but they have very little advertising to speak of and it pays for the bandwidth and moderation of the site.

As far as movies and TV shows are concerned I just recently downloaded the first two seasons of “It’s Always Sunny in Philedelphia”. Charlie Day is on my Friends List on MySpace.com (His real profile, not the mock one that FX made for the show). I recently posted on his site that I downloaded these in hopes to turn other people on to the show and I would be more than happy to send him money for what I downloaded. I will not, however, pay everybody else’s bloated salaries while Charlie ends up getting a measly 2% cut of the DVD sales. I’ve already answered on the poll on fff.net that I would be more than happy to contribute $100.00 or more towards making more episodes or another BDM and I stand behind that as well. I hope in the near future technology will allow us to completely cut out the middleman and the consumers can deal directly with the creative talent. The RIAA, MPAA, NMPA & MPA are well aware of this possibility and they are doing everything in their power to make sure that this is a legal impossibility before the technology and social climate allows for it to truly take off. It is sad that they use the artists and the songwriters as the pity pot here and so many people seem to buy their distorted version of reality.

There are a lot of people in America that are struggling to pay any of their bills. I happen to be a bit more fortunate then the poverty stricken, but I am not rich by any means. For the truly destitute who often find solace in drug abuse or violence, think of how much more enriched their life might have been if they had been given a guitar when they were a child that loved life along with a treasure trove of information to get them on their way to having a musically enhanced life. Before the recording industry had everyone in America listening to the same 50 bands at one time, there were traveling performers everywhere. People were more interesting and there was much more variety in life all around us. What the recording industry and their copyrights have done is stifle and destroy much of the creative juices of the masses which once made this country great. Now we all listen to the same stuff and buy the same stuff and are taught from childhood to do the best we can to conform to those around us.

Back in 1971 George Harrison was sued by Bright Tunes Music Corp because his song “My Sweet Lord” sounded similar to that of a song they owned called “He’s So Fine” which was written by Ronald Mack, and recorded by the Chiffons in 1962. Incidentally, Bright Tunes Music Corp wasn’t even the original producers of “He’s So Fine”. George Harrison lost this case in court and was forced to pay Bright Tunes $1,599,987, not only the earnings from that song, but earnings from other songs on the album that weren’t as popular that got sold, in the judges eyes, because of the popularity of “My Sweet Lord” which was ripped off from “He’s So Fine”. These are two very different songs, and it’s kind of scary when you think that creativity can be legislated in such a bogus way as this and be labeled as “PLAGERISM”, yet I have to hear the exact background beat on Puff Daddy’s “Satisfy You” as I do on Luniz’ “I Got 5 On It”. (And I know I’ve heard it in one or two others already). Modern watered down hip-hop is based on “Sampling” and is so blatant most of the time that it doesn’t take a judge to know that the tune was a rip off. What about Rhianna’s “S.O.S.”? I have to admit that I enjoy her shaking her thing on the video much more than I enjoyed the video for the song when Soft Cell made it in the 80’s and it was called “Tainted Love”, but this is honestly a much more blatant form of plagiarism and I haven’t heard anything about Rhianna or P Diddy going to court. This is because the record industry owns the rights to these songs and as long as they are making the money, they’ll use that same beat for 100 more songs over the next millennia, and they will label it benignly as “SAMPLING”. They own the copyrights on creativity now and they decide who can and who cannot be creative.

NOSADSEVEN:

I’m at work now, so I do not have access to speakers on my computer (Bogus, I know). I will be checking this out tomorrow. It sounds like a real interesting article and the little trivia about the “Ballad of Serenity” is great.

SIMON WHO:

I have heard about these new proposed copyright laws. One day less than forever. If that can be legislated than we’re all truly

ed. What about when drugs keep getting more expensive and the copyrights never run out. Nobody will ever be able to purchase generic drugs and Pfizer will be able to charge whatever they want to make sure your heart keeps beating…. And as Jewel said “So you bargain with the devil, say you’re okay for today”…….. Scary indeed.

JPSTARGAZER:

It’s true… it’s only getting worse. All I can say is I hope your favorite tab sites aren’t based in corporate America and they may have a bit longer of a shelf life until we invade their country and make them conform to our rules too. If you’ve got the tabs, then by all means share them with whoever you can. I have another idea. What do you think of this? I want to buy a couple of cakes of CD’s and burn all of the tabs on them and then place the CD’s in guitar mags at local guitar and music stores with messages on them to pass the love around. If only 5 out of a hundred recipients burned 5 of them for their friends and families and they did the same, there could potentially be millions of these floating around. Just a thought.

I’ve spoken my peace for now. My fingers are getting tired. I will be posting the link to the tablature on this thread tomorrow afternoon or evening hopefully and it will also be on my blog. You may not agree with me, but you can’t stop the music.

"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack

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Tuesday, September 5, 2006 7:09 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

I realized that I did put a whole lot of information on that post and I didn't want anybody to get the idea that I was making up any figures or facts. Consider this my bibliography of sorts.

Here's some information on the legal action being taken against these great websites:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4508158.stm

If you want to read more about the George Harrison case here's a few links:

http://abbeyrd.best.vwh.net/mysweet.htm
http://www.superseventies.com/sw_mysweetlord.html
http://www.answers.com/topic/george-harrison

Here's a YouTube vid of George preforming it live:

Unfortunately, I don't have a clip of "He's So Fine" for you to compare it to. If you have napster you can check it out and make the comparison for yourself.

"A government is a body of people, usually notably ungoverned." http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack

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