[Auntie Dynamite was quoted in The Washington Post. Check it out. --Dave]
I was peacefully listening to Leonard Cohen’s “Death of a Ladies’ Man” yesterday, and when it got around to “Don’t Go Home With Your Hard-On” and Leonard said, “you can’t shake it or break it with your ” I thought, as I often do, “I’ll just toddle over to www.lyrics.ch and see what he probably said.” I visit www.lyrics.ch at least ten times a week and maybe more often, since I tend to listen to music with murky and strange lyrics, and hell, even that famous street-fightin’ man Mick Jagger can be hard to make out (or is that make out with?) sometimes.
When I got there, I saw this:
This server is temporarily shut down. Our servers have been confiscated by the police.
I had the correct response: “What the fuck?”
The New York Times eventually got around to reporting that the site had been set on by a pack of ravenous copyright hounds, asserting they were entitled whack any service that might keep a few dollars out of their consecrated pockets, and waving millions of dollars worth of “I can sue you better than you can sue me.”
I won’t bother recapping the entire situation since you can pause my rant mid-disgorge and go get the dirty from the New York Times site. I will instead ask the burning question: when did we get so rich and stupid as a society that we can afford to sling such bucks at shutting down something so innocuous and frivolously useful as a song lyrics site?
Song lyrics are notoriously difficult to make out if you’re listening to anything harder than Barry Manilow. There’s a Tom Waits song, “Telephone Call to Istanbul”, which I listened to at least a hundred and twenty times trying to decipher more than a quarter of what he’d rasped out. My beloved Jazz Butcher Conspiracy occasionally still befuddles me, after ten years listening to them. Leave us not even get into the most common mishear based on Jimi Hendrix slurring in his purple haze.
So I go to song lyric sites, because I’m an obsessive-compulsive anal-retentive who likes to know the exact offer Satan is making her with that devil music. Or, at least, what the general consensus is on the offer, since the International Lyrics Server only indexed submissions other people had already typed up, and God knows that Satan has enough speech impediments that people will disagree on what precisely he said. At least we can opine on the nature of the proposition.
The legality of the ILS content hinges on whether or not copyright was broken in entering the song lyrics, whether people simply transcribed what they heard, or copied it wholesale from liner notes. It also hinges on whether or not the ILS administrators were directly responsible for entering the stuff, or just housed it in a convenient format, since if they are only a vessel of truth as opposed to makers of truth, they’re not responsible for what gets poured into them.
I have very mixed feelings on this issue, because I love the ILS and I want it back, now, and with an apology and a dozen donuts from the lizards that afflict them. But… Does this mean that if our beloved John Moe gives a poetry reading, and someone transcribes his poems, they can upload them to the net without fear? How, then, does John finance his art habit? Should our copyrights be subject to the whim of whomever has the best ear and the most eidetic memory?
As we grind on into the Digital Age, the concept of copyright becomes increasingly difficult to defend. When everything was on paper, there were artifacts that we could control, and now it’s increasingly possible to make absolutely perfect duplicates of any non-dimensional medium, that can be transmitted essentially at will, no trace, no records, no control whatsoever… We could build better safeguards but they would be cracked. It is easier to assault than defend.
So in a very real way, this frivolous matter highlights the general problem clawing at the modern musician or writer. How can we make enough of the cold hard stuff to keep us living indoors when the primary source of our currency, our control over our original thoughts, is being bootlegged, no longer in back alleys or opium dens, but in public, with advertisements to pay for the bandwidth?
A more interesting and far more timeless question is why power corrupts… why is it that the more possibility for freedom we have, the more consolidated and impossible it becomes to actualize. Why, for instance, in British Columbia, they have banned letting schoolkids pin up their drawings in the school hallways unless those drawings are made on fireproof paper? When no school in the history of British Columbia has ever burned down because Bobby stuck up a crudely executed rendering of a potato?
Have we all gone irrevocably stupid?
In both of these unconscionably dumb incidents, let the burden of proof be on the accuser. Let all laws, all lawsuits, carry a new caveat, that the lawsuit is not frivolous, stupid, or mean-spirited. Let this be enforced. Let Microsoft be beaten about the head and face for deliberately denying benefits to their pseudo-temps. Let the anti-ILS lawyers prove they aren’t attacking ILS simply to be manipulative assholes. And let Bobby post his fucking potato!