OLGA Shut Down. Again.
The Times reports that the Online Guitar Archive, or OLGA, a fan-created database of guitar chords and tablature for popular songs, has been shut down again due to complaints of copyright infringement.
OLGA was first shut down ten years ago, when a complaint from EMI caused UNLV to kick the site off its servers. I was a teenage keyboard player, and had been using OLGA (and the USENET posts out of which it grew) as an online fakebook since 1992 or so. It seemed totally unjust that a noncommercial resource created by and for amateur musicians could be destroyed by one letter from a lawyer. It was my outrage at this apparent injustice, in part, that led me to start learning about copyright law. While I no longer think the copyright holders’ allegations of infringement were entirely without merit, I still feel the sting of losing access to music available nowhere else, at any price.
2 Comments
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
RSS Feed
[…] with del.icio.us | Email this entry | TrackBack URI | Digg it | Track with co.mments | | Cosmos Click here forcopyright permissions! Copyright 2006 Mathew Ingram […]
Pingback by Bad guitarists of the world, unite! » Mathew Ingram: mathewingram.com/work — 21 August 2006 @ 15:22
Everything Old is New Again, in Bb…
In her typically thoughtful column in Wired, Jennifer Granick makes a surprisingly inaccurate statement: “I had just read an article in The New York Times reporting that the Recording Industry Association of America was threatening to sue websites tha…
Trackback by IPTAblog — 30 August 2006 @ 14:07