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Gracenote announces deal to publish music lyrics on the web

Gracenote has inked a major deal with a large number of music publishers to …

Gracenote, the company responsible for the CDDB database that helpfully grabs track and album titles from the Internet whenever you play a CD, has scored a major deal (subscription required) with dozens of music publishers. This deal will enable Gracenote to provide commercial song lyric services over the Internet.

The deal could open the door for download services such as Apple's iTunes Music Store (iTMS) to offer music lyrics to their customers along with song downloads. It represents the largest effort so far to create a legal system of lyric distribution on the Internet. The agreement included publishing companies such as Bertelsmann AG's BMG Music Publishing, Vivendi Universal SA's Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony Corp.'s Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Peermusic, and many smaller publishers, who typically own the rights to music lyrics, as opposed to the record labels who own the rights to the songs themselves.

Many people are speculating that this deal will open the door for legal action against the many unlicensed lyrics web sites now in existence. If this happens, it will strike up a fiery debate over intellectual property rights versus fair use. "Unlicensed reproduction has been a sore point," according to Ralph Peer II, CEO of Peermusic, a large independent music publisher. "But it has certainly gotten to be a more serious sore point as commercial sites have grown to make their income off these lyrics."

Music lyrics sites started off as hobby efforts by fans to share the lyrics of songs they enjoyed, but those quickly got swamped by commercial sites that used the lyrics to hop to the top of the Google charts. Some of these sites even attempt to install ActiveX controls, which typically contain spyware, for surfers using Internet Explorer. Lyrics on the web have clearly become a serious business.

Of course, the effort by the music industry to shut down lyrics sites is nothing new. Warner/Chappell Music sent a cease and desist order to the developer of a small Mac utility that fetched lyrics for songs on iTunes, although they later retracted this demand.

What is the limit for fair use in song lyrics? In US law, song lyrics are indeed copyrighted, and copyright law offers four factors to determine if a fair use exemption applies:

  • the nature of the copyrighted work;

These four rules leave a lot of gray areas, but commercial song lyrics sites would violate rules one and three right off the bat. Whether or not the music publishing industry will extend their lawsuits to include nonprofit sites remains an unanswered question.

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Channel Ars Technica