In August, we wrote how music publishers were suing lyrics sites (and their owners) for daring to "profit off the backs of songwriters." That, of course, makes no sense. People go to find lyrics to music because they already like it and want to find out more about it and the creators behind it. It's good advertising. And yet, publishers have been going after lyrics sites for years. Apparently, the guy behind LyricWiki worked out a deal whereby technically he's shutting down LyricWiki (found via Fan History) but is instead rebuilding the project for Wikia (the company associated with Wikipedia). Wikia has purchased a license from the publishers. While it's good that a lawsuit is being avoided and that the project will continue (sort of), it's still rather troubling that the publishers were able to force LyricWiki into Wikia's arms. Apparently, independently repeating lyrics of a song you like isn't allowed unless you buy a license. Careful singing along... that'll be next.

Last week, we noted that LyricWiki had been pressured to kill its API after music publishers threatened it with a lawsuit. In the comments to that post, someone insisted that there haven't been any lawsuits over lyrics online. If that's true, it just changed. Apparently the removal of the API wasn't enough, as the parent company of LyricWiki, Motive Force Web, along with LiveUniverse (the site run by former MySpace exec Brad Greenspan) have both been sued by a group of music publishers, who are insisting that such sites are unfairly "profiting on the backs of songwriters." I'd really like to see them prove that. These sites aren't profiting off the backs of songwriters, they're helping more people find and understand the lyrics of songs they like. That gives fans a closer connection to the music and more reason to buy things which will actually bring songwriters money. It's stunning how shortsighted and backwards the music publishers are being here.

Even worse, the music publishers didn't stop at just suing the two companies here. They also sued the individuals behind them personally. This is a trick that the record labels have been pulling lately as well. It's legalized bullying. These companies realize that by suing execs of these companies personally, it puts that much more pressure on those execs to settle, even though there's no basis whatsoever to go after those execs personally.

So, nice job Peermusic, Warner/Chappell, Bug Music and your lobbying buddies at the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA), you've pissed off more music fans, made them less likely to find or be interested in music of the songwriters you represent, and have filed misguided lawsuits against individuals who dared to try to provide useful information to the public.

For many years, music publishers have always hated online lyrics sites. Rather than realizing that such sites help people connect better with songs, the publishers only thought in terms of "copyright infringement." Over the years, they've forced a number of such sites to close down. Chris Takacs points us to the latest such move. At the very least, they're not forcing an entire site offline, but they've forced the owner of a lyrics site to shut off its API. LyricWiki had a nice little API that would allow programmers to embed lyrics from the wiki within their programs... but the music publishers freaked out that people might actually read lyrics without paying for them and sent out the legal muscle. As the article above notes, in an era of digital music, where fewer and fewer people are buying CDs with lyrics in the liner notes, online lyrics sites make more sense than ever before. Why are music publishers so against them?

These days, it's nearly impossible not to infringe on copyright in one way or another during your regular day -- but it's always amusing when big-time copyright supporters are caught infringing (and it seems to happen quite frequently). The latest is musicFIRST, the lobbying group funded (potentially illegally) by the recording industry, which has been pushing a campaign claiming that radio is piracy and demanding that radio stations pay even more royalties than they already do.

But, of course, when it comes to licensing or paying royalties itself... well, you know... that's a different story.

Billboard has noticed that MusicFIRST appears to have quoted the entire lyrics to the Beatles song "We Can Work It Out" in a mocking press release it put out earlier in the week -- but failed to get the necessary license. Now, of course, many of us believe that quoting lyrics like that is perfectly reasonable fair use. But... the recording industry (you know, the folks behind MusicFIRST) doesn't believe that, which is why they've shut down plenty of people for posting lyrics on the web and even thrown people in jail for posting lyrics on the web.

But, when they do it? It's fine? Funny how that works...

The decades-long success of the Grateful Dead is a perfect example of how a band can make music without relying on the copyright crutch (by encouraging free sharing of the music, while making most of their money on concert tickets and merchandise). In the years since Jerry Garcia passed away, however, the band's name seems to keep coming up in copyright disputes. The band itself sued Wolfgang's Vault for offering videos and concert posters of the band (Wolfgang's Vault is based on the "archives" of famed concert promoter Bill Graham, and each side claims ownership to the rights of promotional materials from the concerts). And, of course, Wolfgang's Vault is hardly an innocent player here, having sued the publisher of a book about the Grateful Dead for using thumbnail images of concert posters. Luckily, the book publisher won that case, but both of these cases show how a system that works (i.e., the Grateful Dead's business model) gets all screwed up when people start asserting ownership rights to content.

The latest example is much more ridiculous and much more damaging to creativity. Last week we wrote about how copyright is often used to hold back creativity, and this is a perfect example. Boing Boing points us to this story about how Ice 9 Publishing, the in-house publishing arm of the Grateful Dead has stopped a young adult novelist from using lyrics from their songs in his novel. It sounded like a rather creative use of Grateful Dead lyrics in such a way that would likely help attract a new generation of fans to the Dead's music. In fact, the title of the book was originally supposed to be a Grateful Dead song title, but Ice 9 objected to that, too. Even though it couldn't stop the book from using a song title as the book title, it threatened to not allow the use of other quotes in the book if the title wasn't changed.

This makes very little sense, as it's difficult to see what legal ground Ice 9 and the Dead have to stand on here. The use of these lyrics hardly harms the commercial potential of the Grateful Dead -- and, almost certainly increases it. But, just the threat of potential copyright infringement lawsuits means that this book is not the book the author, J.T. Dutton, intended, and everyone is worse off for it. And, that's yet another unfortunate example of copyright holding back creativity, rather than encouraging it.