The company claims pearLyrics “enables people to copy and download lyrics. Inevitably this will enable people to download lyrics owned or controlled by this company, Warner/Chappell Music Ltd.”
See? If you want to know the lyrics of a song, you have to check them in a legit CD that you’ve bought, or at least that’s what I think they want. So, if you get the lyrics from someone else, even if by simply talking, you’re infringing copyright laws. Therefore, the Onion’s article was partially true.
Next, since the names of songs are also copyrighted, you won’t be able to legally speak names of songs out loud.
On totally unrelated news, an ebayer has bid 470 pounds on an Xbox 360 picutre.
What on earth does this have to do with not being allowed to talk about music? It has always been illegal to publish copyrighted texts ( books, poems and lyrics ) without permission. It already is illegal to publish lyrics on the Internet: It’s merely that no one has actually cared enough to hunt down those that do and until they actually do do that on a large scale, they probably don’t still.
But the fact that it’s illegal doesn’t change the fact that it’s rather silly for it to be illegal in the first place. Reading song lyrics generally just makes people more interested in hearing the song, not less interested. And if you shut down any way of searching lyrics, that means that if you hear a song you like on the radio there’s virtually no way of determining what song it is - meaning more losses for the artist in question.
I haven’t said that it isn’t silly and that it shouldn’t be legal, but, yet, how do you intend to discriminate between poems and lyrics? They’re nearly the same.
The difference is that poems are standalone, meaning that the ultimate form of their enjoyment is simply reading them. Therefore, anyone who publishes them on the Internet makes it redundant for the reader to buy them. However, lyrics are simply part of the full enjoyment of a song, meaning that even if someone reads the lyrics, he’s still likely to buy the song.
Btw, one other thing I realized… because it’s now legal to buy music online without ever getting the CD, this would mean that people who legitimately purchase music would have no way of checking the lyrics of the music they just bought.
How do you know she is a witch?