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Comment by tech-no-logical | Hacker News Reader

   sorry this video has been removed from youtube
   sorry this video has been removed from youtube
   sorry this video has been removed from youtube
   sorry this video has been removed from youtube

ad nauseum. nice project, but doomed to fail because of this.

why the downvotes ? even their TOS sort of acknowledges it will not work :

YouTab respects your copyrights and the copyrights of others and therefore requires that you only annotate tablature of your own music or of music that you are licensed to annotate (such as public domain music).

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Here's the reason for your downvotes:

Instead of "you're doing it wrong", suggest alternatives. When someone is learning, help them learn more. https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html

fair enough.

but the criticism stands : it's hardly useful for me as every 2 out of 3 songs will not work. probably because I'm in europe, but still. and I can't suggest alternatives, there aren't any with copyright laws being what they are.

BTW, what we do is completely legal for any song, we did our legal work.

oh come on, 90% of what's on the site now is in clear violation of the TOS I quoted. or are you suggesting that, for example, user 'Descending' owns the rights to 'Help' from the Beatles ?

how do you explain these rules in regard to this :

YouTab also requires that the music videos that you attach to your tablature shall be your own or videos which you are licensed to display; for example, you are not allowed to embed an unlicensed Metallica video and write down your tabs for that song.

true, you have covered yourself by stating these things in your TOS, but after removing all videos that are not in accordance, you're left with an empty site.

seriously, from a technical point of view I love projects like these, but I cannot see how this could ever work in the long run if it's dependent on youtube. at least not as long as large record companies exist and enforce their copyrights as they tend to do.

OK, so here goes:

1. The site is DMCA compliant 2. Lyrics are provided legally through musixmatch 3. Chords as they are presented on the site are legal. We spent a lot of time and money making sure of that.

Yes, the TOS should be updated which I will take care ASAP.

I agree that the site is DMCA compliant, you've covered that. lyrics added by the users for tracks that musixmatch hasn't got the rights to will probably still be a problem. the chords are, I guess, no problem, as you can't copyright a chord progression.

the big problem however is the embedding of material from soundcloud and youtube. while strictly speaking it might be legal, the total experience of your site is severely impacted by the fact that youtube continually removes video's that violate _their_ TOS, leaving orphaned tabs. or, as I myself noticed, blocks embedding of most tracks (at least for me, there's probably some geo-blocking going on).

I really like the interface, I'm very impressed with how well it works for most tracks (and fast too), but by making it dependent on difficult external parties like youtube and soundcloud I don't see it taking off. I've had very similar usability problems with all other projects that attempt similar things.

edit : I'll check back for the updated TOS later. I'm curious what they'll say...

Thanks for the insight. I agree that a 3rd party media provider such as YouTube & SoundCloud has it potential for problems. It's not a perfect solution I agree. I have been toying with re-attaching tabs to different audio sources when a video dies for example. I'm not entirely happy with current results. It should be automatic, which I have a pretty good idea on how to do, but haven't gotten around to implementing yet.

I just checked the competition, they still suffer the same problems you're facing : most videos simply won't load, a lot because they can only be viewed on youtube, some are blocked (for me at least), some are gone.

I guess society isn't ready yet.

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