There's been a potentially interesting new development in the ongoing battle surrounding the protection of copyright online, but this time relating to the publishing of song lyrics on websites. An Austrian based search engine that specialises in finding song lyrics on the net has had to close down after receiving a cease and desist letter from the UK offices of major music publisher Warner Chappell.
According to IT website The Register, the letter says that the pearLyrics service "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". Citing the MGM / Grokster ruling in the US Supreme Court which said software companies could be held liable for copyright infringement if they enable and encourage consumers to access illegal sources of copyrighted music, they called on the developer behind the service to close it down.
PearlLyric's creator, Walter Ritter, has complied with that request, posting the following statement on his website: "As of December 6th, 2005 pearLyrics is no longer available due to a cease and desist letter from Warner/Chappell Music Limited. As a freeware developer I can not afford to risk a law suit against such a big company, although personally I don't see where pearLyrics should infringe any copyrights handled by them. After all pearLyrics only searches and accesses publicly available websites, displays, and, at the users wish, caches its content. Something that can easily be done with any combination of search engine and web browser too. Well, but I'm just a developer and not a lawyer".
Many in the IT community are pointing out that as PearLyric was just a specialist search engine, in theory Warner Chappell should be equally concerned about Google, Yahoo and all the other mainstream search engines, which will have been used by music fans to search for song lyrics much more frequently that Ritter's site.
Presumably Warner Chappell would combat those arguments by citing the old Betamax legal principle which says that technology firms can sidestep liability if customers use their products for illegal purposes providing other customers use them for legal tasks. On that basis PearlLyric is liable because its only function was to search for lyrics, while the big search engines would sidestep liability because lyric searches are just one of thousands of other things people use them for.
Though Ritter could presumably argue that people may use his search engine to access legitimate sources of song lyrics, or lyrics not in copyright, meaning that PearlLyric has legitimate uses too. Either way, this one isn't likely to go to court, but the move by Warner Chappell is interesting given the number of illegitimate sources of song lyrics that exist on the internet. It remains to be seen if the publisher is planning on issuing legal threats to everyone operating in this space without license, and whether doing so will actually benefit the songwriting community, or just further the music industry's increasing reputation as a litigious money grabbing machine.