Music publishers are taking action against guitar fan websites which they say infringe songwriters copyrights. Publishers have started to use copyright law suits to shut down sites which share notations which help musicians to play songs at home. Called guitar tablature, or tab, the notations indicate where players should put their fingers. Books filled with tab are available in shops, but a number of websites make tab notations available for free. Now trade bodies are taking action against those sites.
Some of the tab notations are copied from paid-for books, but most of them are worked out by players just from listening to performances of songs. Some legal commentators in the US suggest that tabs generated by users may have free speech protection.
"People can get [tab] for free on the internet, and it's hurting the songwriters," MPA president Lauren Keiser told the New York Times. The trade associations represent publishers, who share royalties from tab book sales with the composers of the material.
Many of the websites that publish tabs are online communities rather than businesses and claim that much of the music involved would never have tabs created commercially, since only the most popular material is published in tab books.
Publishers argue that copyright legislation protects the tablature because they are "derivative works" of the original songs, which means that they enjoy the same protection. So far none of the sites has fought the orders to stop publishing the tabs.
One of the best known Tab sites that have been taken down is OLGA.com. keep posted for more news on this!
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