Update on YouTube copyright dispute over guitar tutorials [video]
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1) he wrote out the tabs himself instead of copying them from a copyrighted book and
2) he wasn't making any direct money by selling the tabs themselves; however he also acknowledges was getting indirect money via Youtube monetization of the videos that displayed the tabs on screen
Unfortunately, he was naive and probably wasn't aware of history. Back in the USENET days, the famous OLGA On-line Guitar Archive[1] was previously shutdown even though the guitar tabs contributions were made by volunteers for no money.
He was playing with copyright fire and didn't know it.
Because tabs for pretty much anything are fairly easy to find nowadays... except even better: dynamic tabs are very much in the vogue now (tabs with multiple tracks that you can instantly play and verify if it’s good by how it sounds). You can loop certain parts, slow them down, etc for effective practicing.
https://theriffrepeater.com/rocksmith-announces-new-rocksmit...
The main program I used was TuxGuitar [1]. I felt it suited my purposes - I could work out the rhythm and positioning with this program and play files in various formats. The sound quality and features were adequate - sort of a low-fi MIDI sound where different timbres and instruments could be selected. It looks like it may not be a maintained product, but the source is available if you want to tinker with it [2].
Another program that my friends used to use is Power Tab. The original programs look to be abandoned, but it seems that an open-source implementation is actively maintained here. [3]
There is a commercial product called Guitar Pro, but I felt the open-source packages were good enough. Guitar Pro also had an active community (maybe it still does), and many users would contribute their own tabs in Guitar Pro's file format (.gp3, .gp4, etc.) which I would read and edit with TuxGuitar. It used to be pretty easy to find these files available online, but I suspect copyright holders cracked down on these communities much like they did with OLGA.
(Disclaimer: I help make it)
And then, to further the travesty, those freely contributed tabs were hoovered up by commercial sites and became only available there.
I think that the situation is like this. The music publishers' whole assertion was that, because of licensing laws around sheet music, the tabs were not so much illegitimate as inherently owned by the publishers. Regardless of who created them or how. Thus OLGA couldn't publish them without licensing them. (And OLGA couldn't afford the licenses, obviously.)
But since -- again, under the publishers' legal theory -- the tabs are owned by the publishers, they could license the tabs to whoever they liked. Such as these new leeches.
And no one has had enough interest to challenge this state of affairs. It would probably take some kind of class action, gathering up a bunch of the tab authors. And I have no idea if that fight is even feasible under existing law.
This isn't a crazy outcome and it matches up well with traditional property laws. For example, suppose Olga came to my house without my knowledge, mowed my front lawn for me, and then I come home and I eject her for trespassing. In that case I still get to enjoy my nicely mowed front lawn (i.e., the product of Olga's labor) and Olga doesn't have any right to payment because we didn't have any kind of agreement. (Note: This actually happens sometimes when painters paint the wrong house. The owner getting a free paint job is less bad than forcing the owner to pay something he didn't bargain for.)
Yeah, but copyright is not a form of traditional property right. Intellectual "property" rights are better thought of as intellectual monopolies granted for a limited time, and this is important because intellectual works have some very different properties that separate them from physical property.
For instance, in your examples, the lawn mower cannot easily "un-mow" the lawn nor the painters "un-paint" the house. Any attempt to do so would be labor intensive. However, in the OLGA copyright case, the publishers can trivially force the infringers to no longer publish the tabs, undoing any further damage. In the lawn mower and house painting case, the labor is fundamentally tied to the physical property being infringed. However, with intellectual property, this is explicitly not the case. The tabs do not alter the original song in any way, they are merely a derivative work.
To be explicit, while the transferal of rights over the tabs to the copyright holders may be granted by a judge as part of reparation of harm done, I see no reason that the music publishers should presume to own the rights outright without the intervention of a court.
For one final example as to why we should not conflate intellectual works and physical property, if I were to trespass onto your land and paint a beautiful painting of your landscape (with supplies I own) and then leave without causing damage, do you... own the painting? Just own the copyright? Own none of it? It is definitely not clear to me that you should automatically own my painting, even if I infringed your property rights by trespassing.
If the tabs do not alter the original song in any way, then they are more like a literal copy than a derivative work. A literal copy, even one that took a long time to make, will not contain any separately copyrightable elements. A derivative work, however, may contain its own separately copyrightable elements, even if it was made without permission. For example, Fifty Shades of Grey started out as a Twilight fanfiction by E. L. James called Master of the Universe. James could not publish Master of the Universe without infringing the Twilight elements owned by Stephanie Meyer. But nor could Meyer publish Master of the Universe without infringing E. L. James's copyright in the elements that didn't come from Twilight.
> the transferal of rights over the tabs to the copyright holders may be granted by a judge
It is unlikely that a court would ever transfer title from an infringer to a copyright owner because (1) it's not necessary, and (2) in the case of a derivative work it may be unjust. To continue my prior example, if Stephanie Meyer had sued E. L. James for publishing Master of the Universe, it would have been unjust for a court to transfer title to her because the infringing derivative work contained copyrightable elements separate from those created by Stephanie Meyer. Usually a court will just order payment of damages (money), except where damages alone would be unjust. In the case of a settlement, however, the parties may agree to whatever terms they want.
Here, as I understand it, the tabs do not contain copyrightable elements separable from those owned by the composer. If a tab contained an adaptation of one instrument to a different instrument or an adaptation of several instruments to a solo instrument, then there may be some separate copyrightable elements in that adaptation. However, if the tabs are merely one-to-one transcriptions of the guitar part of the original composition, then once you take away the original composition there is nothing left that is separately copyrightable. If that is the case, then the tab creators have no rights, even though they spent time and effort in the transcription.
> if I were to trespass onto your land and paint a beautiful painting of your landscape
This example is easy to answer. I wouldn't own the painting because it was merely left on my property (technically, I would be called an involuntary bailee). I wouldn't own the copyright to the painting because I didn't paint it. If the landscape is natural, then I don't own any copyright in it because I didn't create it (in copyright terms, I'm not the author). The landscape might include something copyrightable, however, perhaps a sculpture that I created. In that case the painting may infringe on that copyright, but I would have to make the usual arguments (literal copying, substantial similarity, etc.) and you would make the usual defenses (fair use, etc.).
It isn't a crazy outcome in the context of current IP law. I personally think it's an outrageous outcome and shows a clear weakness of that state of law.
Could you say exactly what you find outrageous about it? Is it the idea that someone could spend a lot of time and effort on something only to find out that the product of their work has no value?
From there, it should be possible to mangle it into a tabulature?
Does that exist on github? Could be an instant olga without copyright violations.
What you expect not to be too hard to do, is actually the 'holy grail' of the field - Algorithmic Melody Transcription is the kind of thing people write entire papers on[0].
[0]: https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/pubs/PolEFGSO07-meleval.pd...
There are a few toy examples if you search "algorithmic music transcription github," one of the better-known ones is [1] (but it's limited to piano music). They're all pretty nascent. It's a real hard problem :)
[1]: https://github.com/rachhshruti/automatic-music-transcription
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBDJDZAo41c
> From there, it should be possible to mangle it into a tabulature?
A produced pop track might be a little extreme, but there's a lot going on in these tracks. Even if you know the chord progression, it's hard to tell if a note played by a guitar is played by the rhythm guitar, lead guitar, an overdub, something with double tracking, or even an overtone from the bass, especially when the note makes the chord an add4. The same goes for walking basslines played by the guitar.
You also arrange things differently for solo performances, live performances with a band, and produced performances, so even if you could extract a rhythm guitar tab from a recording, that might not be how you'd want to play it solo.
Back then:
- https://youtu.be/8zeLKMHxbN8?t=561
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ2lWslJVOc
Now:
Song melodies are copyrightable, as are recordings, and lyrics. But chord progressions are not. So a guitar tab containing only chords (not lead melodies) and no guide lyrics sounds to me like it ought to be entirely fair to publish. Of course, many tabs include lyrics or other elements that verge into copyright infringement, but the idea that all tabs are necessarily derivative from the original song and subject to its copyright sounds wrong on the face of it.
I can't remember if the issue was a sudden spike in traffic or legal threats but I do remember that it was taken down. Still, compared to the sort of repercussions we take for granted nowadays, it almost seems quaint that all he got was a slap on the wrist and it had to be taken offline.
Thank you for analyzing. This gives fantastic context into the problem he had with his lack of copyright knowledge.
The big issue I have here is he was navigating a minefield. He and people like him are the reason YouTube exists. There has to be a better way of what YouTube is doing than just a "if you trip up a minor easily exploitable offense you are gone".
His sob story definitely left details out, but this is the way of YouTube. And YouTube gives no real support unless you go viral with your sob story.
So in the end... This is just fucking terrible.
"Obsessed with putting ink on paper” by LilyPond - HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1515262
Unfortunately it seems the site is offline, here's a waybackmachine version https://web.archive.org/web/20100717010107/http://lilypond.o...
The fact that he handwritten some stuff means nothing to me (I am not an IP lawyer). If I buy someone's book, and start making handwritten copies, and giving them away for free am I not breaking any IP/copyright/etc. laws?
The "for free" or "for profit" is also a valid point in the discussion, as the "fair use" is.
I am wondering on the following:
1) did he get a lawyer, and the lawyer told him that he was on the WRONG, and he changed his tune and re-working all his videos?
2) did he get a lawyer, and the lawyer told him that he was on the RIGHT, but it would be cheaper to revamp all his vids instead of chasing this in the court?
There are some things he is not telling, but it's ok. It's his business, he will play it as he wishes.
I have a music tech channel. I have about 1/100 of those subscribers and I get about £80-100 a month. I'm sure he's doing pretty well out of his channel.
He's also making $2k per month from patreon, [1] so if he really has had to remove all his content as a result of this, claiming he's not making any money from it seems a bit of a stretch.
As a software developer you wouldn't even think of copying copyrighted code of some other project. The project would need to be free/open source to do so. So, I am wondering why it should be ok for music to be copied but for software we have this distinction. After all, if the songs would be creative commons, noone would complain.
The closest (admittedly weak) analogy I can think of in the software world is if you reverse-engineered some existing software by simply observing its behavior. That’s not copying someone’s code, but is this copying someone’s entire work? That’s similar in some ways to recording a cover of an existing song. That’s a philosophical debate I’d love to have, and a legal issue for IP lawyers.
The usually accepted baseline is $1 per 1000 views on Youtube (raise to 2-3 for a respectable channel with a US/EU audience).
It's a myth that Youtube doesn't pay. Creators with millions of views can earn a living. Actually a pretty good living outside of the most expensive metro areas.
Who has the money decides what is fair and what goes. Everyone else, however much of a case or point they have, tough luck.
He now has to remove the guitar tabs in order for the claim to be removed.
Unfortunately transcribing music to a tab or a sheet is subject to copyright. Even transcribing the lyrics of a song is. In fact music sheets are a very lucrative business.
Some sheets are also impossible to find because copyright holders refuse to re-publish them and will sue you if you try to transcribe that music yourself and publish it for free.
Copyright doesn’t seem to have much to say about infringing works created in private for private use, that never interact with the market. They’re infringing in theory, but in practice no copyright-holder has ever(?) gone after such infringement, because it’s just impractical to find out about it.
Now imagine an ML model that, when fed audio, emits perfect tabulature corresponding to said audio—without actually being overfit enough to contain an embedding of any real tabs; and where all the training data to the model was public-domain.
If an end-user of such a model applied it to a song, and what the model ended up synthesizing out was a copyrighted tab, then the end-user—and not the creator of the model—would be the one responsible for infringing upon the work, right? But, since that particular tab doesn’t exist anywhere except on their computer, then—if they just used it for practice, rather than publishing it—it’d be a private creation for private use, “invisible” to the copyright system.
It seems to me that, as long as the ML model didn’t actively advertise its ability to infringe on the copyrights of these particular tabs; or guide users into doing so; then it’d be safe to sell the model (or software that embeds it), right? Even safe to sell it as fit-for-purpose for being an aid in learning/practicing music.
In theory all of this is illegal - because you don't buy the music with a CD, you buy a license to listen to the music from that particular run of the CD.
Automated transcription - already a solved problem for solo piano and guitar, and partially solved for more complex source separation applications - would follow the same rules.
So - technically an infringement, but you wouldn't be sued for private use.
Sooner or later this will turn into an actual court case. Until then, the law on automated transcription is ambiguous. IANAL but I would guess it depend on whether a transcription product is sold as a "music ripper" for other people's work, or as a study aid for your own playing.
And of course CD/stream ripper software has never been illegal. There have been various short-lived DRM efforts, but none of them seem to stick for long.
Now it's fairly easy to rip Spotify playback, but no one seems to mind. But if you started running your own Spotify competitor they might - even on a small scale.
You don't buy the right to listen to a CD, you buy a copy of the CD and the music for use as you wish.
Many European countries have an explicit right to private copy, you can copy/transform/archive anything you have for personal use. There is a tax on storage media that goes to the labels. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_copying_levy
I believe the US has something similar (you can do whatever you want with the copy that you own) but an American would be better place to comment on that.
What you generally don't have (across jurisdictions) is the right to make copies and distribute them.
CD rippers have never been illegal. They are illegal in a few places if they circumvent copy protection mechanisms and even there it depends on the details.
You can have a look at the legal FAQ of VLC media player that debunks some of the myths. https://www.videolan.org/legal.html
There's a piece of software called 'Capo', for example, that assists with the process of transcription, albeit not generating tab directly, but which analyzes a piece of music and helps you pick out and transcribe notes as tab - and for personal use, of course there's no problem doing so. It should be okay if it went further and attempted to autogenerate tabs. It does chords already, for example.
And writing the tab out, for your own purposes, from a recording you have bought, is not infringing copyright on the original any more than listening to a copyrighted recording you have bought through speakers in your own home is infringing - I mean, it's possible that it could be considered 'format shifting' a work, like copying a vinyl onto a tape, but really it's more akin to just taking really detailed notes as you listen...
And having a software tool that helps you do it seems like a reasonable thing to use, so how could it be infringing?
In a way, if some ML software existed that could generate accurate tab from an audio file, then that software, plus a guitar, is just a really low-fidelity digital-to-analog converter pipeline for turning the original recording into audio. Just the same as an AAC codec + pair of headphones. The codec turns the original compressed data into a series of numbers representing audio samples, which a speaker turns into sounds; the Tab-transcribing ML turns the original data into a series of numbers representing which strings and frets to play, which a guitar player turns into sounds.
So on that basis, it seems hard to argue that the existence of such an ML model is a copyright circumvention device, any more than you could argue that a speaker is a copyright infringement device.
But...
What if the way you trained the ML model in the first place, for example, was by feeding it copyrighted guitar tabs of copyrighted recordings? In particular, what if it was only for a very limited repertoire - say you just trained it on Hendrix recordings, and official licensed Hendrix tabs?
Then, if you hand it something other than a Jimi Hendrix guitar performance, it might not be very good (although I bet the results would be interesting!) - but if you hand it any original Hendrix recording, the same recording of Little Wing that was used in training it, for example - then there's a really good chance it would just reproduce the official tab of Little Wing.
The legal question might be, does the ML model embody the knowledge of how to produce a good tab from a recording, or just contain the memory of, and ability to reproduce, the copyrighted work?
And when it comes to something like music, that gets very close to asking the question of, when it comes to a musical performer producing a song that sounds similar to a copyrighted work they were influenced by:
Do they embody the knowledge of how to write a song that sounds like that or are they just reproducing their memory of the previous copyrighted work?
Which gets to the 'originality' test in copyright law. And applying that in the case of an AI piece of software sounds... challenging.
But on the other hand, it's pretty clear, for example, that when you hand an audio file to the AAC codec and it produces audio from it, that you can't argue that the codec is just reproducing the memory of the right sounds to make, prompted by the audio file - but on the other hand, it's not like the codec is bringing nothing to the table in terms of figuring out how to turn the 1s and 0s on disk into sounds.
But even if you used copyrighted inputs, that raises a tangential question that's even more interesting to me: if you get a human musician to transcribe your song into tabs... and that human musician learned tablature using copyrighted tabs... then is the musician's mind (or anyone who employs it), in some sense, infringing?
Food for thought :)
No band living off performance fees from local bars and restaurants is going to have the time or money to track down and pay copyright owners for the sheet music or performance fees for the songs they’re covering. It’s the most they can do to get a mechanical license for covers on albums they record—and that often would go to the producer or publisher anyway.
I would argue that the original author retained the copyright and mine is a derivative work.
If I took a film, and re-enacted the scenes, does my film infringe upon the original film?
This is a bit ambiguous, if the film were presented as parody for example, but you'd still out of courtesy, contact the copyright owners and see if they / their lawyers think it's infringing before spending years doing so
If I took someone's game, recreated it from scratch, and made a youtube video tutorial, "how to make this game including indistinguishable graphics, textures and gameplay" would the resulting video be infringing?
Even more ambiguous than the last example - if the language stated "similar to" and the resultant product was distinguishable in some way, I think it wouldn't infringe.
My gut feel is that guitar tabs is simplified sheet music - and sheet music is copyrightable, because even if the the play style of the artist is slightly different from the original, the arrangement of the music is what is copyrightable, and the original authors deserve at least some of the proceeds from the use of that copyright
The original author. Translation is not creating a new work.
https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyr...
In some cases original copyright expired but translator copyright still applies.
But if I make translation, then I may be unable to distribute i. But in exactly the same way original author would need to have my permission to distribute translation.
Key on this one is indistinguishable but there are many Minecraft clone type games by fans and Satisfactory is basically Factorio in 3D and the authors admit being inspired by Factorio. The other reality is that its also at the copyright owners discretion to make it an issue. Course if its fully original graphics it makes it harder to argue for copyright infringement I am sure.
I would go to OpenRCT2, which specifically has you copy over the graphics from a genuine copy of RollerCoaster Tycoon 2, and OpenTTD, which includes new graphics in place of the ones from Transport Tycoon Deluxe. However, no one actually knows if this is enough of a difference to matter. It's more about convincing the original creator to ignore it than actually being legally robust.
And then for non-game software we have Java in Android.
There’s a good movie about this premise:
You'd be infringing on the copyright of the script.
In the film analogy, it's closer to Shrek Retold[1](ignoring parody).
[1] Shrek Retold https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM70TROZQsI
Obviously there is a difference between copyright and infringement. Or DMCA should take down playgrounds.
Can one make a business by printing copyrighted music score/tabs? No.
Can one educate playing music with copyrighted tabs? Yes, fair use allows with limitations [1], somewhat similar to libraries not ready for digital age.
[1] https://nafme.org/my-classroom/copyright/copyright-law-what-...
It is better to think about whose rights would be infringed if your edited version were published. If you were to publish your edited version, then you would infringe the original author's rights in the original. However, if the original author were to publish your edited version, then he would infringe your rights in your edits.
> if the language stated "similar to" and the resultant product was distinguishable in some way, I think it wouldn't infringe.
The question of infringement isn't whether the alleged copy is distinguishable from the original, it is whether the copy contains elements that are "substantially similar" to copyrighted elements of the original. (Note: "Substantial similarity" is a specific legal term of art in copyright law.)
So it doesn't matter if you transcribe the music by ear. You're still transcribing *someone else's composition" - and they still own the copyright.
This is true even if you get it substantially wrong - but then it's useless anyway, in a teaching context where the whole point is for it not to be wrong.
The copyright holders think that what Graeth was doing was like taking a audiobook, listening to it and transcribing the whole book and then profiting from it.
It's not copying the performance, sure, but it is taking a roundabout way to copy another copyrighted work.
Although this kind of arranging can be done quite formulaically, when done well it is usually a genuinely creative process involving plenty of choices on the part of the arranger. I dabble (badly) with an acoustic guitar, and quality solo arrangements that aren't too hard to play are a very valuable thing. The best arrangement I've created for myself could be generously described as mediocre, despite being based on the official sheet music.
The copyright lies in the musical composition itself. A graphical representation of that musical composition, whether in the form of classical sheet music or guitar tablature, may infringe that copyright if it is not licensed or made by the composer.
Note: This may be more complicated when the tablature is made from a recording by a musician other than the original composer because the musician may have added embelishments, accents, or stylistic elements that are not part of the original composition but are separately copyrightable. In that case then a tablature may infringe on two persons' copyrights, those of the original composer and those of the recording musician.
> So how would you be able to tell whether it was infringing or not?
You tell the same way that you can tell whether any item is infringing: If it was not made by or under license from the copyright owner, then it may be infringing.
For example, when Taylor Swift plays her song "My Tears Ricochet" there's essentially two things that separately copyrighted: 1) The musical notes and words in that particular order, and 2) the performance itself (e.g. Taylor Swift performing it). [1]
Using the performance itself is what YouTube typically has a licensing arrangement for. If you weren't on YouTube, you'd need to license it separately through ASCAP and pay them directly. Also, when you do license it you don't have carte blanche rights to do whatever you want with it, the license will come with limitations on where you can use it ("sync rights"[1]), both technology-wise (e.g. TV, radio, internet, mobile, etc) and sometimes even geographically (e.g. North America, Europe, USA/Canada, etc).
In order to perform the work yourself in public, you actually need different permissions called performing rights [2]. These licenses will typically allow you to perform the work using a musical instrument and/or your voice. You'll often pay different amounts if you charge for your performance or not, if the performance is professional versus amateur. Also, you're not typically allowed to reproduce the sheet music or lyrics physically, either for sale or to give away. I suspect you'd also pay more for imprinting the words on a screen (e.g. sing-a-long style).
All this complicated licensing is not part of the copyright law itself, it's separate is really more about contract law. Copyright law allows the copyright owner to assign rights, the owners have elected to assign them in a way designed to extract the most amount of profit from their asset.
I'm not saying I like the way the copyright system works (I don't), but that's how the law is written.
Also, I'm not a lawyer...just someone passionately upset about copyright and patent law.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronization_rights [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performing_rights
Sounds like a good opportunity.