In my youth there were these things called LPs, big, ugly and made of vinyl. They (normally) included the song lyrics so that we'd be able to figure out what the hell Bob Dylan was singing. In the digital age more and more of us buy our music via download, whether from Apple, Rhapsody, Napster, or any other internet based content distribution system, those lyric sheets are no longer available. A young software developer saw a need, and tried to meet it. He created a software plug-in for iTunes, called PearLyrics, that would search available internet lyrics databases to bring users the lyrics for their downloaded songs. Simple, no? Indeed, he was not unique, Apple's latest OS has a plug-in architecture called Dashboard, a way of launching applets (called Widgets) quickly, and many developers had created Widgets that served the same purpose. PearLyrics, however, was the most popular.

However, the Music Publishers Association has decided that buying a song doesn't entitle you to know what the hell the singers are saying. Because they've been issuing cease & desist orders to one and all. Now, as these plug-in applications do nothing more than search websites for available data, they could indeed win in court. However, because the people that wrote these mini-applications are all small fries, their resources are not equal to the sort of fight that they would face to defy the MPA. This is the official statement of Pearworks concerning the end of their program, and why. More disturbing still is the hard-on that the MPA seems to have for websites that serve up lyrics, for reference this quote from Lauren Keiser of the MPA sums up the attitude of the armed banditi, ""throw in some jail time I think we'll be a little more effective". Really? Jail time for guessing what singers are singing?

So, next up for the MPA is the closing of internet lyrics sites, and jailing their owners. And the US government will be complicit in jailing its citizens to protect the corporate profits of music publishers. Just as it already jails people to ensure the corporate profits of large software developers, record companies and movie distributors. There isn't even any debate by the denizens of state whether or not lyrics websites actually do impact the corporate profits of music publishers. Have any of you that aren't musicians ever bought a lyrics book for an album? Professional musicians may need accurate lyrics and tablature, but does anyone else? In fact, this whole enterprise looks more like an attempt by corporate America to use government to create new customers by fiat.

An English academic (whose abstract I do not have handy, and if anyone knows his name, please email me) observed that people tolerated copyright because it was not overly oppressive, but that once it became oppressive they would turn against it. Unfortunately that has not been the case, while protest has risen on the anarchist fringe, the progressive fringe, and the academic fringe, there has been no united opposition to the ruthless extension and criminalization of intellectual property laws in the U.S. Like a slow boiled frog Americans simply accept the Sovietization of their society. America, ain't it great to live in the land of the free?