7 ms·

I can understand how we got here, but the idea of a guitar tab being copyrighted is strange to me. It's not like you can do a "clean room implementation" of a g

I can understand how we got here, but the idea of a guitar tab being copyrighted is strange to me. It's not like you can do a "clean room implementation" of a guitar tab: if you're transcribing the music accurately, the resulting tab should look indistinguishable from the copyrighted one. So how would you be able to tell whether it was infringing or not?

throw_m239339 6y ago
> I can understand how we got here, but the idea of a guitar tab being copyrighted is strange to me. It's not like you can do a "clean room implementation" of a guitar tab: if you're transcribing the music accurately, the resulting tab should look indistinguishable from the copyrighted one. So how would you be able to tell whether it was infringing or not? 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.
- derefr 6y ago
  This makes me wonder about the dynamics of copyright. As far as I understand it, copyright only really matters if you first create/obtain an infringing work, and then introduce said infringing work into the market somehow (by distributing it, selling it, broadcasting it, etc.) 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.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Technically even making a copy of a CD for your own use counts as copyright infringement. When cars had CD players people would often make CDRs of their favourite CDs, and now people rip CDs to files. 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.
    - user5994461 6y ago
      You're very very wrong. Don't believe blindly everything that the music companies want you to believe. 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 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 https://www.videolan.org/legal.html
      - deleted 6y ago
- TimTheTinker 6y ago
  This is why the fake books became such a thing. 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.
turnerc 6y ago
I think it's more that he was earning income from the guitar tabs, since the original song is copyrighted would it not count as a derivative work?
robinduckett 6y ago
If I took a published book, fixed all the grammatical errors and maybe even sometimes improved the sentence structure or changed a few minor words to improve the readability of a sentence without changing the meaning, who owns the copyright to my creation? 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
- unreal37 6y ago
  Or just took a book from English and translated it into French. Who owns the copyright on that? The original author. Translation is not creating a new work. https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyrightable-works/translation/ https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyr...
  - slim 6y ago
    if I create subtitles for a film in a different language, who's the author?
    - kadoban 6y ago
      You, but it's a derived work, you can't distribute it legally without permission from whoever owns copyright on the film. (not a lawyer)
TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
Every piece of has a number of different musical copyrights. The rights to the song itself - usually represented by sheet music in any form, so tab will do - is one of them. The rights to a specific recording are a different one. 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.
SahAssar 6y ago
A performance and it's composition are under two different copyrights. Think of it as a book and it's audiobook. 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.
retsibsi 6y ago
In this case the tabs (those of his that I've used, anyway) are not note-for-note transcriptions, but arrangements for solo guitar. Basically he takes the melody, chord progression and other distinctive features of the song, and puts it all together in a way that is playable and sounds good on a single guitar without a singer. 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.
bdowling 6y ago
> the idea of a guitar tab being copyrighted is strange to me. 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.

throw_m239339 6y ago

> I can understand how we got here, but the idea of a guitar tab being copyrighted is strange to me. It's not like you can do a "clean room implementation" of a guitar tab: if you're transcribing the music accurately, the resulting tab should look indistinguishable from the copyrighted one. So how would you be able to tell whether it was infringing or not? 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.

derefr 6y ago
This makes me wonder about the dynamics of copyright. As far as I understand it, copyright only really matters if you first create/obtain an infringing work, and then introduce said infringing work into the market somehow (by distributing it, selling it, broadcasting it, etc.) 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.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Technically even making a copy of a CD for your own use counts as copyright infringement. When cars had CD players people would often make CDRs of their favourite CDs, and now people rip CDs to files. 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.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    You're very very wrong. Don't believe blindly everything that the music companies want you to believe. 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 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 https://www.videolan.org/legal.html
    - deleted 6y ago
TimTheTinker 6y ago
This is why the fake books became such a thing. 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.

turnerc 6y ago

I think it's more that he was earning income from the guitar tabs, since the original song is copyrighted would it not count as a derivative work?

robinduckett 6y ago

If I took a published book, fixed all the grammatical errors and maybe even sometimes improved the sentence structure or changed a few minor words to improve the readability of a sentence without changing the meaning, who owns the copyright to my creation? 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

unreal37 6y ago
Or just took a book from English and translated it into French. Who owns the copyright on that? The original author. Translation is not creating a new work. https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyrightable-works/translation/ https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyr...
- slim 6y ago
  if I create subtitles for a film in a different language, who's the author?
  - kadoban 6y ago
    You, but it's a derived work, you can't distribute it legally without permission from whoever owns copyright on the film. (not a lawyer)

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago

Every piece of has a number of different musical copyrights. The rights to the song itself - usually represented by sheet music in any form, so tab will do - is one of them. The rights to a specific recording are a different one. 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.

SahAssar 6y ago

A performance and it's composition are under two different copyrights. Think of it as a book and it's audiobook. 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.

retsibsi 6y ago

In this case the tabs (those of his that I've used, anyway) are not note-for-note transcriptions, but arrangements for solo guitar. Basically he takes the melody, chord progression and other distinctive features of the song, and puts it all together in a way that is playable and sounds good on a single guitar without a singer. 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.

bdowling 6y ago

> the idea of a guitar tab being copyrighted is strange to me. 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.