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I disagree with your book comparison. Tabs describe a piece of music, in particular, a specific part of it (guitar). A rewritten book based on another book is not a description in this sense. In my (non-legal) opinion, tablature should not be copyrightable because several people could write the same exact sequences without each other’s knowledge and there would be no way to prove who created the work first.

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But in this case he’s not writing his own song that just happens to sound exactly like another song (which is an entirely new can of legal worms); he’s stating that his intention is to create a print representation of an existing song. So your argument falls apart on those grounds.

My argument doesn’t fall apart at all. Creating a “print representation”, in this case tablature, of an existing song is and should be perfectly legal. If no one was allowed to transcribe someone else’s music, be it chord charts, musical scores, or tablature, then musicians could not function unless they all played by ear and memorized everything. The issue here is that he’s monetizing the tabs, which brings into question who “owns” the tabs. Nobody does, because copyright law does not define tablature as derivative work, although lots of music publishing industry lawyers would have you believe otherwise.

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