6 ms·

Ok, I watched the video and his rationale for why his guitar tabs were "fair use": 1) he wrote out the tabs himself instead of copying them from a copyrighted

by jasode 6y ago

Ok, I watched the video and his rationale for why his guitar tabs were "fair use": 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-line_Guitar_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-line_Guitar_Archive

rwnspace 6y ago
I cannot convey how much I miss OLGA. My first taste of irritating copyright laws over art was they came for Napster, but I was still pretty young so I didn't feel it much. When they came for OLGA, I was skipping school to play guitar 12+ hours a day. It was around my 15th birthday. I'm pretty sure I cried. I still have a precious folder of printouts from <2006 - I don't play guitar much now, but it only just occurred to me that OLGA is probably somewhere online... :D
- pen2l 6y ago
  Do you miss the community element of it or what? 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.
  - oxygenoxy 6y ago
    Can you provide any links to info on dynamic tabs?
    - rdbell 6y ago
      https://www.songsterr.com/ https://www.songsterr.com/
      - deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
    - mahmoudhossam 6y ago
      Rocksmith is basically guitar tabs on steroids, and it's been getting content for almost 7 years until they finally stopped a few months ago.
      - Aengeuad 6y ago
        Should be noted that they stopped working on DLC to focus on what will probably be a sequel. https://theriffrepeater.com/rocksmith-announces-new-rocksmith-project-end-of-weekly-dlc/ https://theriffrepeater.com/rocksmith-announces-new-rocksmit...
      - bjelkeman-again 6y ago
        It has a lot of custom made content by volunteers here. http://customsforge.com/ http://customsforge.com/
    - felipe_ii 6y ago
      There were a few programs that I used in the past to write and playback my own tabs. 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. [1] http://tuxguitar.com.ar/ http://tuxguitar.com.ar/ [2] https://sourceforge.net/projects/tuxguitar/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/tuxguitar/ [3] https://github.com/powertab/powertabeditor https://github.com/powertab/powertabeditor
  - viraptor 6y ago
    It's still hard to find quality tabs that go beyond chords. Even ultimate guitar with its "official" tabs is not great - they don't match the recording or are accurate with notes, but are not possible to play (things like ghost notes on 2nd fret between two barre chords on 8th).
    - ulucs 6y ago
      Ultimate guitar just copies the most popular guitar pro tab and labels it official, they might be paying the tabber, but they are not tabbing themselves.
wool_gather 6y ago
> the famous OLGA On-line Guitar Archive[1] was previously shutdown even though the guitar tabs contributions were made by volunteers for no money. And then, to further the travesty, those freely contributed tabs were hoovered up by commercial sites and became only available there.
- kbenson 6y ago
  That seems like it should be illegal. Even if the commercial tabs were copyrighted, I wouldn't think they could take someone's work product without recompense. Unless maybe ownership/licensing went to OLGA on submission and they were part of damages?
  - wool_gather 6y ago
    There were no damages as far as I know: I'm not sure what the OLGA org consisted of, but I don't believe it ended up going to court. They decided the fight was too big. 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.
    - bdowling 6y ago
      As I understand it, this is basically correct. OLGA and the tab creators couldn't publish the tabs because they didn't own the musical compositions. The only ones who could publish the tabs without being sued were the owners or licensees of the composition rights, the publishers. So effectively they owned them even though someone else did all the work to make them. 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.)
Grollicus 6y ago
I suspect naively it shouldn't be too hard to decode an existing recording of music into the notes played. Maybe combined with some instrument discovery? 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.
- akersten 6y ago
  > I suspect naively it shouldn't be too hard to decode an existing recording of music into the notes played. 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.pdf 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://github.com/rachhshruti/automatic-music-transcription
- dehrmann 6y ago
  I recently stumbled across some videos where a producer breaks down how some very good songs are produced. Here's one he does for a Max Martin track where you get screenshots of the track in Pro Tools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBDJDZAo41c 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.
- CMay 6y ago
  Celemony Melodyne has supported some form of Audio to MIDI translation for over a decade and may be the most accurate at it. Back then: - https://youtu.be/8zeLKMHxbN8?t=561 https://youtu.be/8zeLKMHxbN8?t=561 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ2lWslJVOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ2lWslJVOc Now: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvBYZPlitWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvBYZPlitWE
marcan_42 6y ago
I do wonder what the legal basis for copyrightability is here; to some extent, this sounds like the publishing companies might be making legal arguments up that would not stand up in court. 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.
soylentcola 6y ago
A friend of mine in college (mid-90s) thought it would be cool to host a mirror of OLGA on a bit of server space he got as a computer science student as a way to help out the project. 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.
Justsignedup 6y ago
First of all 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.

by jasode 6y ago

rwnspace 6y ago

I cannot convey how much I miss OLGA. My first taste of irritating copyright laws over art was they came for Napster, but I was still pretty young so I didn't feel it much. When they came for OLGA, I was skipping school to play guitar 12+ hours a day. It was around my 15th birthday. I'm pretty sure I cried. I still have a precious folder of printouts from <2006 - I don't play guitar much now, but it only just occurred to me that OLGA is probably somewhere online... :D

pen2l 6y ago
Do you miss the community element of it or what? 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.
- oxygenoxy 6y ago
  Can you provide any links to info on dynamic tabs?
  - rdbell 6y ago
    https://www.songsterr.com/ https://www.songsterr.com/
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - mahmoudhossam 6y ago
    Rocksmith is basically guitar tabs on steroids, and it's been getting content for almost 7 years until they finally stopped a few months ago.
    - Aengeuad 6y ago
      Should be noted that they stopped working on DLC to focus on what will probably be a sequel. https://theriffrepeater.com/rocksmith-announces-new-rocksmith-project-end-of-weekly-dlc/ https://theriffrepeater.com/rocksmith-announces-new-rocksmit...
    - bjelkeman-again 6y ago
      It has a lot of custom made content by volunteers here. http://customsforge.com/ http://customsforge.com/
  - felipe_ii 6y ago
    There were a few programs that I used in the past to write and playback my own tabs. 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. [1] http://tuxguitar.com.ar/ http://tuxguitar.com.ar/ [2] https://sourceforge.net/projects/tuxguitar/ https://sourceforge.net/projects/tuxguitar/ [3] https://github.com/powertab/powertabeditor https://github.com/powertab/powertabeditor
- viraptor 6y ago
  It's still hard to find quality tabs that go beyond chords. Even ultimate guitar with its "official" tabs is not great - they don't match the recording or are accurate with notes, but are not possible to play (things like ghost notes on 2nd fret between two barre chords on 8th).
  - ulucs 6y ago
    Ultimate guitar just copies the most popular guitar pro tab and labels it official, they might be paying the tabber, but they are not tabbing themselves.

wool_gather 6y ago

> the famous OLGA On-line Guitar Archive[1] was previously shutdown even though the guitar tabs contributions were made by volunteers for no money. And then, to further the travesty, those freely contributed tabs were hoovered up by commercial sites and became only available there.

kbenson 6y ago
That seems like it should be illegal. Even if the commercial tabs were copyrighted, I wouldn't think they could take someone's work product without recompense. Unless maybe ownership/licensing went to OLGA on submission and they were part of damages?
- wool_gather 6y ago
  There were no damages as far as I know: I'm not sure what the OLGA org consisted of, but I don't believe it ended up going to court. They decided the fight was too big. 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.
  - bdowling 6y ago
    As I understand it, this is basically correct. OLGA and the tab creators couldn't publish the tabs because they didn't own the musical compositions. The only ones who could publish the tabs without being sued were the owners or licensees of the composition rights, the publishers. So effectively they owned them even though someone else did all the work to make them. 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.)

Grollicus 6y ago

I suspect naively it shouldn't be too hard to decode an existing recording of music into the notes played. Maybe combined with some instrument discovery? 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.

akersten 6y ago
> I suspect naively it shouldn't be too hard to decode an existing recording of music into the notes played. 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.pdf 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://github.com/rachhshruti/automatic-music-transcription
dehrmann 6y ago
I recently stumbled across some videos where a producer breaks down how some very good songs are produced. Here's one he does for a Max Martin track where you get screenshots of the track in Pro Tools: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBDJDZAo41c 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.
CMay 6y ago
Celemony Melodyne has supported some form of Audio to MIDI translation for over a decade and may be the most accurate at it. Back then: - https://youtu.be/8zeLKMHxbN8?t=561 https://youtu.be/8zeLKMHxbN8?t=561 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ2lWslJVOc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ2lWslJVOc Now: - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvBYZPlitWE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cvBYZPlitWE

marcan_42 6y ago

I do wonder what the legal basis for copyrightability is here; to some extent, this sounds like the publishing companies might be making legal arguments up that would not stand up in court. 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.

soylentcola 6y ago

A friend of mine in college (mid-90s) thought it would be cool to host a mirror of OLGA on a bit of server space he got as a computer science student as a way to help out the project. 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.

Justsignedup 6y ago

First of all 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.