| Corporate Greed - Lyrics vs. NMPA |
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| The story | |
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| Source: New York Times |
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Home of Corporate Greed |
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company The original text can be found at NY Times online January 19, 1999
Lyrics Site in Copyright Dispute Is ClosedBy MATTHEW MIRAPAUL The International Lyrics Server, a popular Web site containing the words to more than 100,000 songs, was closed on January 14, 1999 after music publishers accused the site's Switzerland-based operators of copyright violations and police officers seized their computers, the site's founder said. Karl Aschminn, the prosecutor in charge of the case for the Swiss canton of Basel, confirmed that a criminal investigation was underway, but he declined to respond to additional questions. Pascal de Vries, a network consultant in Basel who founded the site in February 1997, said that when the Lyrics Server was active, it received an average of a million hits per day from 100,000 visitors seeking the words to chart-topping songs by bands like the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith, as well as to show tunes and obscure ditties. The database could by searched by song title, artist name or key phrase. The Lyrics Server's home page now says that it has been "temporarily disabled," in what appears to be the music industry's latest success in cracking down on Internet sites that reproduce copyrighted material without permission. On Thursday, de Vries said, police officers from the cantons of Basel and Zurich arrived simultaneously at his apartment, his technical consultant's Zurich home and their Zurich-based Internet service provider (ISP). Not finding de Vries in, a team of officers went to his office, only to learn that he was out with a client, he said. But the police did find Roger Meyer, his technical consultant. After interrupting Meyer's morning shower, they confiscated the two servers on which the site resided, and he was ordered to surrender his passwords so the files could be accessed. He was then interviewed for four hours. Police also took invoices related to the Lyrics Server from Cyberlink Internet Services, the site's ISP, he said. De Vries said the police were responding to a criminal complaint filed by lawyers for the Harry Fox Agency, on behalf of Warner/Chappell Music Inc., Polygram Music Publishing Inc. and six other music-publishing companies. The Harry Fox Agency is the licensing arm of the National Music Publishers' Association, a trade group in New York representing more than 600 American music publishers. Fox Agency officials did not return phone calls seeking comment on the case. De Vries met on Monday with a district attorney for a three-and-a- half-hour preliminary interview. He said has yet to be charged, but he also faces a hearing on Friday for an earlier civil case brought by the Harry Fox Agency. "I say I didn't do it," de Vries calmly asserted in a telephone interview on Saturday. He explained that it was the site's users who had contributed the lyrics, at a rate of between 200 and 300 new songs every day, and that he was merely making them available in an organized fashion, somewhat akin to how and other music-oriented newsgroups do. He said he had not entered any of the words himself. He also argued that the lyrics were listeners' personal transcriptions from albums and radio broadcasts, not copies of official sheet- music versions, and that debates would regularly occur over inaccuracies. He said, "For us, it was just a kind of discussion database, not something to harm the music-publishing companies." "They think that they have lost millions through our server," he continued, "but they have to prove this, and they didn't prove it yet. If they can, this could cost me millions [in damages] -- which I never can pay back. But I think the main goal is not to get money, because I don't have too much of that, but to have something of an example. They want [use this episode] to tell other sites that it's really clear you don't have any chance." De Vries said he was continuing to sleep well, despite the prospect of a stiff fine or a jail sentence. "The law is quite an old law, not specific for the Internet, so there is plenty of room to discuss," he said. Nevertheless, he acknowledged that his case may have ramifications for the Swiss ISP industry. Last May, the former head of CompuServe Deutschland was sentenced to two years in jail on the charge that he distributed pornography that was accessible through his service. The sentence was suspended and German laws have been approved that largely exempt ISPs from legal responsibility for material that users post. Swiss law has yet to be modified, de Vries said, which means Cyberlink might face prosecution. In an e-mail message, Beat Tinner, Cyberlink's managing director, pledged to fight any charges against his company, comparing it to package-transport service. He said: "We consider ourselves to be a carrier of data. We cannot control the contents of the data packets traveling through our network." Tinner also shared de Vries's conception of the Lyrics Server as a free, newsgroup-style resource. He said: "Users were adding songs, and the owners of Lyrics could not check [the copyright status of] each and every song. And the song texts were not sold." The Harry Fox Agency, which represents 19,000 American music publishers, has been aggressive is ferreting out copyright violations on the Internet. Last June, the Online Guitar Archive, a repository for song chords and lyrics, voluntarily closed after the Fox Agency threatened legal action against it. The U.S. site remains shuttered, although a half-dozen international mirror sites continue to offer its contents. In December, also at the Fox Agency's behest, a civil court in Switzerland ordered the Lyrics Server's operators to remove 26 specific songs, which were published by the same eight companies that de Vries said are responsible for the new criminal action. To comply, de Vries said, it took him about four hours, in part because he was not certain which of the 30 songs in the database titled "For You" was at issue. A hearing on the civil case also is scheduled for Friday. "Until then," he said, "we thought nothing else would happen." The Lyrics Server was run as a non-commercial venture, although de Vries began accepting banner advertisements in October 1997 to offset the fees charged by his ISP for the heavy site traffic. He said the million daily hits, split evenly between search results and lyrics downloads, cost the site 20,000 Swiss francs (about $14,500) per month. "We never took money for ourselves," de Vries said. "We had to do something. Otherwise we would have had to shut down the server because of financial problems." Now de Vries has legal problems and he is not sure how soon, if at all, he will be able to relaunch the site. Randy Eisenberg, an amateur musician in Chico, Calif., who uses the site, said: "I find the closure to be an enormous loss. As a member of a garage band, for me it was a most amazing resource and in no way would an artist or publisher be threatened by my use [of it]." The Lyrics Server was launched after de Vries's rock band, First of May, struggled to find the correct lyrics for Deep Purple's "Smoke on the Water" and other songs they wanted to cover. He recalled: "I thought it would be good if there was something like that on the Internet. But I didn't find anything good, so I thought I'd start doing it myself." After transferring 40,000 lyrics from a German server, he entered them in a searchable database and launched the site. Not that de Vries benefits directly from the Lyrics Server's contents. In his quintet, two others share lead-vocalist duties. He is the drummer. Matthew Mirapaul Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company |
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