As most of you know, loads of guitar tab sites are being shut down after being threatend by the MPA (and other similar organisations).
The MPA is a non-profit organisation whose members "professionally" produce authorised tab books. I say "professionally" because these tab books are often fairly laughable.
The internet has allowed people to share their own transcriptions freely, many of these are of poor quality (yet still provide a useful starting point for learning the songs, it's also interesting seeing how other people interprete things), yet some are of very high quality. The band or record label who holds the rights to the original song holds the rights to any tabs being produced, the MPA presumably only holds the rights to derivative works of their own official transcriptions.
Yet it's the MPA who are taking action, not the bands or record labels - apparantly the benevolent MPA have decided to do this on behalf of the poor bands and labels. Given that very few online tabs are produced from copying out a tab book from a shop, I doubt the MPA actually has any legal right to sue (law students correct me if i'm wrong). From what I can see, the MPA is just threatened by the fact that people are doing for free what they make a living from, and doing a far better job of it.
They claim that they're keen to enter some royalty agreement with any website that wants to make a business from selling tabs online, but I don't see how this can conceivably work, nobody is going to pay money for something when they don't even have any guarantee of its quality until they've downloaded it. I just can't think of a viable business model.
The idea that you should have to pay for something that is completely an interpretive work is something that should only occur if the person being paid is the person who created it.
Your thoughts?
The MPA is a non-profit organisation whose members "professionally" produce authorised tab books. I say "professionally" because these tab books are often fairly laughable.
The internet has allowed people to share their own transcriptions freely, many of these are of poor quality (yet still provide a useful starting point for learning the songs, it's also interesting seeing how other people interprete things), yet some are of very high quality. The band or record label who holds the rights to the original song holds the rights to any tabs being produced, the MPA presumably only holds the rights to derivative works of their own official transcriptions.
Yet it's the MPA who are taking action, not the bands or record labels - apparantly the benevolent MPA have decided to do this on behalf of the poor bands and labels. Given that very few online tabs are produced from copying out a tab book from a shop, I doubt the MPA actually has any legal right to sue (law students correct me if i'm wrong). From what I can see, the MPA is just threatened by the fact that people are doing for free what they make a living from, and doing a far better job of it.
They claim that they're keen to enter some royalty agreement with any website that wants to make a business from selling tabs online, but I don't see how this can conceivably work, nobody is going to pay money for something when they don't even have any guarantee of its quality until they've downloaded it. I just can't think of a viable business model.
The idea that you should have to pay for something that is completely an interpretive work is something that should only occur if the person being paid is the person who created it.
Your thoughts?
