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.
The New York Times reports that the Music Publishers'
Association (MPA) and the National Music Publishers'
Association (NMPA) have shut down several websites or forced
them to remove all tabs using threats of copyright law suits. The
sites are typically fan-run and not significant profit-making
enterprises.
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.
"The company which owns this website has been indirectly
threatened with legal action by the National Music Publishers'
Association (NMPA) as well as the Music Publishers' Association
(MPA) on the basis that sharing tablature constitutes copyright
infringement," said a statement at one of these sites, Guitar Tab
Universe, from its manager Rob Balch. "At what point does
describing how one plays a song on guitar become an issue of
copyright infringement? This website, among other things, helps
users teach each other how they play guitar parts for many
different songs. This is the way music teachers have behaved since
the first music was ever created. The difference here is that the
information is shared by way of a new technology: the
internet."
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.
"When you are jamming with a friend and you show him/her the
chords for a song you heard on the radio, is that copyright
infringement? What about if you helped him/her remember the chord
progression or riff by writing it down on, say, a napkin ...
infringement?" said Balch in his statement. "If he/she calls you
later that night on the phone or e-mails you and you respond via
one of those methods, are you infringing? I don't know."
