(via techdirt)

Sean Colombo of LyricWiki.org explains it on the API developer page:

Dear LyricWiki API Developers,

It has been a great run, and I have seen some fantastic and interesting applications come from all of your skills and hard work.

Unfortunately, licensing agreements with the biggest publishers in the music industry require us to no longer offer the ability for programmatic access to LyricWiki’s collection of lyrics. We tried to arrange some way to let API Developers license through us, but this was not possible.

While this is not something we are happy about, it is a necessity in order to finally secure licensing for LyricWiki from the major publishers which will allow the project to survive indefinitely.

Actually this is nothing new. Infuriated by their inability to stop song downloading labels decided to broaden their scope of legal threats and started to take measures against sheet music and lyrics sites: Song sites face legal crackdown, reported the BBC in December, 2005.

One of the victims was pearLyrics, an automated lyrics searching application that offered a very similar service to Harmonic. The programmer of pearLyrics had to take the software down due to legal threats. MPA president Lauren Keiser went as far as actually wanting website owners jailed:

Mr Keiser said he did not just want to shut websites and impose fines, saying if authorities can “throw in some jail time I think we’ll be a little more effective”.

Now almost four years later the situation didn’t seem to improve much. LyricWiki content is created entirely by users who take the time to type lyrics in from album leaflets or from listening. The site offers compensation in form of royalties to the owners that contact them. Yet in order to appease the industry even this wasn’t enough.

What bothers me most in the whole story is that there is no alternative. The music industry does not offer lyrics in an electronic format. Granted CD booklets often contain lyrics but why do I have to be the one that types all that in? Not even the music downloaded from iTunes or Amazon has lyrics, even though there is a tag that supports it.

I’m sure millions of lyricists died in starvation at the poorhouse because of Harmonic and lyricWiki.

Now I’m wondering if it would be possible to use the API to identify the lyrics URL then have curl grab the page and apply some regexp to extract the valuable part (the lyrics). Not that I could code it, but I recall a last.fm stalking script that created a growl notification from a person’s “listening now” status working quite the same way.

Click here to view the embedded video.
Hilarious as it is on its own, there’s also a parody: A Gaythering Storm. You may recognise Sarah Chalke (Scrubs), Sophia Bush (One Tree Hill), George Takei (Heroes), Jane Lynch (Glee) and others:



‘They’ll dance at us. And it’ll be choreographed.’

If you ask me, gay people are not out there to hurt anyone. They don’t want to make anyone else gay either. They just want to live their lives in peace and be… gay. In all possible senses of the word.

This is a lot more that can be said about the bloodthirsty religious fanatics who, as some self-proclaimed protectors of morality, want to tell other people what they should or shouldn’t be able do. Ironically enough Christianity is said to be a religion based on love. Well at least on paper.

The verdict is not final, both sides are allowed to appeal to the high court. It is important to mention that the verdict applies to these four individuals, The Pirate Bay website and organisation is not affected. Even though the judge also stated, that:

“the usage of BitTorrent at The Pirate Bay is illegal”

Which in itself quite shocking. And so are the possibilities if this verdict becomes a precedent for future trials.

Apparently the copyright holder lobby is still going strong and their ambiguous reasoning to enforce copyrights seemingly holds up even in a court of law. If anything this decision slows down the evolution of alternative rights management models and preserves the industry of dinosaurs a while longer.

Source: Torrentfreak.

The technology is called HDCP – High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection - and its main purpose is to protect digital content traveling through various high definition capable display ports from being copied. In this case it also prevented the teacher from showing a movie to his class on a projector.

Arguably a presentation of a movie to a classroom of kids stretches Fair Use or Private Viewing, and I don’t know what the relevant US laws say. But still I think that if any DRM causes this kind of frustration to the rightful owners of the content, then it is flawed, and very much so.

Also if we assume that the exact same thing could happen to anyone who would want to watch a perfectly legally obtained HD movie at home, it’s hard to argue that the protection used is effective. (In the teacher’s case the Mini DisplayPort – VGA adapter caused the error.) Rightful owners should not be treated like criminals.

Commenters pointed out that the incorporation of the HDCP technology is probably the price Apple had to pay for getting a permission to put BluRay devices in future Macs. Also, since Apple is in the unique position of offering a download-and-carry model with the iTunes Store – meaning the customers will have a fully assembled movie file on their end when buying content – the licensors can play all kinds of hardball games with Apple in exchange for letting their content in.

Now we know what the law thinks, least in Australia:

Cartoon characters are people too, a judge has ruled in the case of a man convicted over cartoons based on The Simpsons, in which children are shown having sex.

Now this one raises a plethora of questions. Does it mean cartoon characters have human rights as well? What constitutes as a cartoon character? If an Australian kid scribbles an obscene cartoon on the side of his math book in class using stick figures can he be prosecuted? And why is pornography special when in almost any cartoon the characters break the law in many ways?

Neil sums up smartly at the beginning of his quite lengthy post regarding the topic:

If you accept — and I do — that freedom of speech is important, then you are going to have to defend the indefensible. That means you are going to be defending the right of people to read, or to write, or to say, what you don’t say or like or want said.

Just another example I stumbled upon is the joint decision of UK internet providers to collectively block a wikipedia page for allegedly dangerous imagery:

The blocked page of the online encyclopaedia shows an album cover of German heavy metal band Scorpions, released in 1976. Internet providers acted after online watchdog the Internet Watch Foundation warned them its picture may be illegal. The IWF said it was a “potentially illegal child sexual abuse image”.

The album cover belongs to Virgin Killer featuring a naked prepubescent girl. The decision stirred up so much controversy the wiki page was even locked up for a while preventing edit warring.

I tend to think looking at that album cover or the comic with the Simpsons can’t turn anyone into a pedophiliac. And I believe it’s absurd that something drawn, i.e. not real, can be grounds for child porn prosecution.

Your video “Osaka Tabehodai & Karaoke EMV” has been identified by YouTube’s Content Identification program as containing copyrighted content which Avex Entertainment, Inc. claims is theirs.

Your video is no longer available because Avex Entertainment, Inc. has chosen to block it.

Yes it’s very likely I prevented that couple hundred people who watched the video from buying the song… In my opinion if the movie had any impact whatsoever, it’d be promotional. People who didn’t know the music might have become interested.

I did what others did before, used a song I actually own on CD to supplement a short video I made. Sadly the senseless and counterproductive system of copyrights we have today prevents me from sharing it apparently. The – statistically proven – truth is that any form of sharing is not even hindering sales but boosting it. People get to like songs, TV shows, movies through the internet and then they start spending money on them. Kind of what I wrote about the Little Brother. It’s also not stealing.

Oh yeah, please note, it’s not the artist who made the claim, but some corporation I have never heard about. Am I supposed to believe they work in their artist’s best interest?

There are two others like this, the Masatoya EMV and the what_used_to_be EMV. Watch them while you can.

Obviously I can just put my video on any other of the countless sites available. Eventually freedom will win. You can’t stop the signal.

Read the EFF’s whitepaper: Dangerous Terms: A User’s Guide to EULAs.

Reader License Agreement: By reading SeSam.hu (henceforth: the site) you agree that you shall, in three business days, transfer all your earthly belongings to the owner of the site…

You grant to Google and its subsidiaries an unrestricted, sublicensable, assignable, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid-up license to your name, voice, image, persona, likeness and performance in any media taken or to be taken of you by or on behalf of Google (“Likeness”).

Érdemes elolvasni.