There is a new wave of copyright driven censorship sweeping across the net. You are probably not aware of guitar tab sites, used by musicians to learn how to play songs. These sites are no threat to the copyright holders, they are just trying to learn how to play their music.

From the Music Student and Teacher Organization (MuSATO):

A BBC web article dated 12 December, 2005, quotes US Music Publishers Association president Lauren Keiser as saying that unlicensed guitar tabs and song scores were widely available on the Internet but were “completely illegal”…and further that the owners of these sites should “be jailed”.

One of the remaining sites is Ultimate-Guitar.com, who are protected from the MPA’s flurry of shutdown letters because they are located in Russia. They are also actually paying royalies through the ROMS system:

Ultimate-Guitar.Com website is absolutely legal tablature archive which activity is based on a Russian Organization on Collective Management of Rights of Authors and Other Rightholders in Multimedia, Digital Networks & Visual Arts (ROMS)’ license. ROMS is the national Russian organization providing professional collective management of authors’ property rights and protection of interests of rightsholders in cases of use of their works in digital interactive networks, including the Internet.

And guitartabs.cc has this to say:

When you are jamming with a friend and you show him/her the chords for a song you heard on the radio, is that copyright infringement? What about if you helped him/her remember the chord progression or riff by writing it down on, say, a napkin… infringement? If he/she calls you later that night on the phone or e-mails you and you respond via one of those methods, are you infringing? I don’t know… but I would really like to know. If anyone has information on this, please email support@guitartabs.cc.

Apparently, the NMPA/MPA believes that the Internet may be on the foul side of the legality line they would like to draw here. For me, I see no difference. It’s teachers educating students and covered as a ‘fair use’ of the tablature. The teachers here don’t even get paid nor do the students have to pay this website to access the lessons.