Online tablature - piratical menace or harmless music community?

[JDP]

Hi all. I have recently tried finding some tabs for songs online only to find the sites have been closed down (maybe temporarily, maybe permanently) due to an ongoing MPA crackdown on free online tabs.

I'd be interested to hear what people's take on this is? Is it equivalent to digitising an author's work and making it free online? If it's illegal for me to write a tab online for a song, is it also illegal for me to show someone how to play a song? Is it illegal for me to play someone else's material??? (I know it's not actually illegal, but you get the drift).

I can see the record company's POV to a certain extent - they want to make money off songbook sales. But where does community music end and piracy begin...?

[chrispenycate]

Basically, if you sing someone else's material in public (or leave your window open while listening to a CD loud, or print out a copy of the words of a song you sing and give them to another musician) without declaring it to the relevant performing rights society then, technically, this is theft. Personally I don't think the chord sheet/lyric downloads are anything but positive, in that they increase the probability of declared performances, but it is certain that when performing rights were invented, a couple of centuries ago,(to guarantee an equitable part of the generated income for the original creators) paper scores were the chief means of music distribution, and were the most rigorously controlled. Intellectual property organisations still understand this much better than more – sophisticated –electronic techniques.

Record producers have practically nothing to gain (and a fair amount to lose from this move; it's the editors who are risking extinction. And editors are useful, particularly at an international level, in gaining income for those musicians who do not generally have huge record sales.

[Foxbat]

I agree with Chris on this one. Although illegal, it's a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face. On a more practical note (pun not intended), if you are gigging then the venue is the one that normally shells out for the performance licence (at least in the UK) so nothing to worry about there.

As for showing somebody how to play a song - as long as it doesn't constitute a public performance in an unlicenced place you should be OK