joegratz.net

There’s been a good deal of coverage today of Google’s new music search service. But the most interesting part, to me, hasn’t received much notice. On the result page for each individual song, there’s a two-line snippet of the lyrics, followed by deep links to copies of the lyrics on the usual lyrics-sites-of-questionable-legality. The snippets are short and help to identify the song, so they’re probably privileged as fair use. In my opinion and that of many others, a link alone is almost never an infringement, and Google would fall under the information location tool safe harbor in any case.

This feature comes at an interesting time in the life of lyrics-sites-of-questionable-legality. Since the death of the University of Wisconsin-Parkside lyrics archive (which died, incidentally, due to lack of institutional support, not because of copyright concerns, and which was mirrored by AOL until 2002), a number of sites have popped up offering copies of the lyrics to popular songs. These sites became so comprehensive that a third party wrote a program to automatically download lyrics for synchronization to iPods. The developers of the program, pearLyrics, ceased distribution after a threatening letter from a music publisher. (The underinformed are advised to direct their ire at the NMPA, not the RIAA.)

Fred von Lohmann wrote an essay arguing that when a consumer downloads a copy of the lyrics to a song of which he owns a legitimate copy, the consumer is engaging in fair use. There’s been a good deal of debate on the issue among Those Who Should Know on the Pho listserv, with reasonable positions staked out on both sides.

Boy, is it an interesting week to be a lyric. And it seems likely to get even more interesting.