Last night I was playing guitar with a couple of friends. Our play-list included some Nirvana and Tenacious D. (we played our one original song too) (which by the way is on a CD that can be bought in a store, but probably impossible to find) (I sing lead on that song too) One of my favorite Tenacious D songs is called “Double Team”, but last night I couldn’t figure out how to play it. So I was sitting there playing a few notes, trying find the first one. JP noticed me searching for it, so he said to me, “Its an E minor.”
I strummed an E minor. He was right. Then he said, “next it goes to a C.”
I strummed an E minor, then a C. He was right again. From that point I remembered how the song went, and we played the rest. (just to emphasize, it’s a great song)
Did JP break the law last night?
Websites, that essentially do what JP did for me last night are now being threatened with legal action. The Music Publishers’ Association is accusing guitar tab websites of copyright infringement. The biggest US guitar tab websites have already shut down. (there are still plenty out there)
Tab (short for tablature), is a way for people who can’t read sheet music (like me) to see how a song is played by diagramming the finger positioning on the guitar. Guitar tab websites do two things: 1) allow users to post their interpretation of how a song is played in the form of “guitar tab”, and 2) allow other users to view these tabs. According to Music Publishers, this is the same as stealing copyrighted sheet music.
According to me, the Music Publishers are idiots. Is the bad PR they’re going to get for this actually worth the money they hope to make selling sheet music? Who buys the sheet music for rock songs anyway?
It's one thing if webmasters were making profits from these sites, but they’re just running the sites to be an open forum. They’re showing people how to play a song, just like JP did last night.
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