Can you hear Warner Music's teeth grinding as they look at this?

Google might help them sell some music! Or generate some interest in their dying industry! It links to lyrics sites AND online music stores! Oh Christ, the humanity of it all…

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This is what I look like when I'm stunned. Warner Music has apparently apologized to the guy who was trying to make music lyrics available to folks who, you know, like to listen to music, where they had previously told the guy to go pound sand.

But if you check out this article from Wired, you see…the rest of the story:

One of Ritter's recent brainstorms — an application that queries lyrics data online to help music fans choose tracks based on themes, like "love" or "breakup" — may now remain only an idea, he says.

"I'm concerned with how I should go on with software development, because this will be a potential issue — every time I come up with something that people like, someone might say 'you can't do that, it's illegal and it infringes copyright," Ritter told Wired News. "It's getting really difficult to be innovative as a small developer."

(Bowler tip to Boing Boing for the linky to Wired)

Now, let's cogitate on this for a second, because a couple of things spring to mind.

The music industry, who never misses an opportunity to piss off their customers, is beginning to attack sites that offer lyrics. In typical music industry fashion, they are striking out blindly. Sure, you could make a case for going after sites that run ads and make money off of publishing online lyrics that the sites themselves don't own. But I don't personally see the point in this, because if you're looking for lyrics to a song, chances are you already have a copy of the song. Whether it's illegally obtained, legally obtained, you've got the song. Does it really make any difference to anybody if somebody who has a copy of the song wants to know what's being said in the song? When was the last time you thought about driving to a music store (as in, one that sells sheet music, if you can find one) and thought, "Oh, to hell with that. Hal Leonard can kiss my ass. I'm going to STEAL THE LYRICS FROM THE NET! MOOHOOHAHAHA."

No, you've never thought that. I doubt seriously that a single sale of sheet music has been lost to the internet over lyrics. Ever.

Tablatures are mentioned as well, and for those of you like me who are about as musically proficient as a dead armadillo, you might not know that the tabs are what help you play a song on the guitar. That's another kettle of worms, frankly, although honestly, having been in a band, it's not like removing tabs from the Net is going to keep anybody from covering someone else's music. I've seen songs go from the stereo to being covered live in the next room in less than an hour. So.

But let's go back to lyrics, because they're a glaring example of everything I've been complaining about with this copyright nonsense. We've established that lyrics are generally only consulted by people who already have a copy of the music. And it's obvious that the music industry's War on Downloading is about as effective as America's War on Drugs. Both Wars have achieved two things: a lot of money thrown in the crapper and a lot of people pissed off and inconvenienced.

Here would be my advice to Walter Ritter, he of pearWorks who caused this shitstorm in the first place by daring to like music enough to want to make the experience more pleasurable to other music lovers: stop. Why are you rewarding the music industry with your time and effort when their reaction is to shoot you down and waste your time with angry letters of legalese? They don't want your help. They apparently don't need your help.

If you really want to do something to help yourself and other music lovers, take your idea of making an app that finds music based on your mood, and make an app that finds music by musicians who want people to hear their stuff. You know, those folks who are the Anti-Warner Music. The artist who understand that if they are found via pearMusicMood (or whatever you're going to call it), they will be found by a new listener and thus, might sell some copies of their album.

It might be helpful if there was a one-stop shop where you could find artists who actually want to be shared, which I've offered to compile, but no one seems to be really taking me seriously.

Honestly, people: the music companies, the movie companies, a large number of artists and so forth…they don't love you. You're like people caught in an abusive relationship, you know that? You keep thinking "Maybe if I do this, they'll love me again." But they won't. They're just going to keep hitting you with cease and desist letters and lawsuits and other such signs of their "affection" until you finally break up with them and leave them. You want to remake "Steamboat Willie" or write your own Superman story, and instead of making your own characters or cartoons or shacking up with creators who will actually treat you nicely, you stay with the big abusive SOBs who want you to enjoy their art but Their Way or not at all. The only way these assholes will ever stop is if you stop giving them your time and money. There are so many bands and writers and artists of all shapes and sizes who deserve your money more and will love you the way you want to be loved.

Just let it go, okay? Seriously.

Very interesting article over on Concurring Opinions about a potential backlash (of sorts) against bloggers from the mainstream media. Can the MSM use copyright to put the smackdown on folks who are criticizing the living hell out of MSM articles? Can they use copyright, in other words, to keep bloggers from using their own words against them?

There's a comment from a gentleman by the name of Bruce that I think puts the kibosh on that, or at least throws up enough legal chaff that might protect bloggers. ("Well spoken, Bruce!") Daniel Solove, the original article's author, does pose another interesting question, though: what about the use of copyrighted images in blogs?

First up, I thought about our basic policy on using images, particularly on Needcoffee. If we're featuring a product, we've obviously been sent that product to promote it and pictures are a part of that promotional effort. So that's covered. There's only one studio who's very particular about their photos and screen grabs and stuff, so we just don't use pictures for their featured items to spare ourselves the hassle of complying to those terms. Everybody else seems grateful for the coverage.

Anytime we use an image that's obviously from somewhere and not just floating out in the etrick, I try to put an "Image taken from" and a link to the source. I wouldn't think somebody would be upset because they just got a free out-of-nowhere product feature with a link of where to buy (if the thing's for sale) or if nothing else traffic from our link. So that's covered. I would hope.

He mentions a shot of, say, Tom Cruise taken from elsewhere. If it's from a magazine, well, those show up all over the Net, and not just on blogs. Celebrity pic sites, fan sites, the whole nine–they all use those things. People, for example, trying to take on that kind of mountain seems, to be anyway, to be pissing in the ocean. Serving cease and desist letters on that would be fighting the hydra. I suppose you could try it but once you unleash that beast, I can just see, if we follow the RIAA's lead, some widowed grandmother having to pay a $5000 fine because her orphaned twelve-year-old granddaughter (who lives with her) used a computer to create a [insert celebrity name] fansite on a free hosting service and used five copyrighted photos. That approach has worked so well for the music industry, ayup.

I've never considered taking stock photos from sites like the article suggests, though. That seems like asking for trouble. Now…you're probably wondering where the whole "free idea" aspect of this comes in. Let's say that places do get a little antsy about you using, hell, I don't know, a stock photo of a terrier. Somebody could create a service that does nothing but take photos of things and provide a license to a site to use them. $50 for the rights to use any photo from this new service on your site for a full year.

Then, of course, I can see it being taken even further than that. If it really gets bad, I can see an organized movement among net photographers. I mean, if we can have Grey Tuesday, certainly we can have a day where net photographers release ten photos into the public domain each. They could be anything: a picture of a hummingbird, a tree, a lion, whatever. Take a picture, upload it to a service, and bang, stock photos are reduced in value further. And I've seen some photographers who post their stuff to the net. These aren't, well, me with a digital camera. They know what the hell they're doing.

Even better, photographers could post this stuff to their blogs with a "free-photos" tag so they can be easily found (via Technorati or whatever rises to take its place). You need a picture of a hummingbird for an article. Search "free-photos + hummingbird" and you're done. Maybe people are already doing this. I'm a webmaster hermit. I know very little. But I do know the more people try to hold onto things, the better off we'll be if we just all work around them.

Good news is it's not an issue. Not yet, anyway.

Stapler tip to Boing Boing. I'm not currently wearing a hat and the stapler's the first thing I could grab.

Update: I just like the way the minds at Emergent Chaos work.

"Do not try and change radio. That's impossible. Instead…only try to realize the truth."

The News Blog has an interesting overview of how radio is following in the path down which television has already gone: we pay for television because we want what we want. Just like some folks pay for Tivo (and other such services) because we want what we want when we want it.

I forget how long ago I read this in Wired, but the line (or at least a reasonable facsimile) stuck with me. The article was about satellite radio, and said we'd pay for radio because of the same principle that made us pay for cable TV: a free service can suck so bad you'll be willing to pay for it.

Setting aside the fact that a paid service can work around the FCC and their idiocy (only for now–the decency loons are going to go after all that next, no doubt), I'm wondering how many people listen to radio like I listen to radio: I roll my own. For example, I took an Airtran flight recently on one of their planes that comes with XM Radio in every seat. I unplugged my headphones from my iPod, plugged them into XM, went through all hundred channels, thought "Well, that's nice," and went back to my iPod. As is in evidence by this site, if nothing else, I'm a control freak. I don't want somebody else telling me what to listen to.

I also wonder about these studies showing that people only have a hundred songs they listen to. Can this be accurate? I have 4500+ songs on my iPod at any given time (out of the 8000+ I have ripped thus far), and sure, if I'm not in the mood for B. B. King or System of a Down at a particular moment, I'll hit skip. There are certain songs I listen to more than others. I sometimes get a hankering (yes, I said hankering) for a particular artist or genre. But for the most part, I'm content to sit back and let my own personal radio station, WIDG, do its thing. If somebody only has a hundred songs in their listening queue, that's sad. But if you've got a wide array of listening options, Shuffle Songs is a wonderful thing.

When I decided on "One Tusk" as the name for my production company/one-man band of killer gypsy ninjas, I was basing it on Ganesh, the Hindu god that is considered to be the destroyer of obstacles, since this was to be my way of getting around the obstacle of not being in print.

But now that they've figured out what the narwhal uses its single tusk for, I'll claim it too. Why not?

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Find them here.

What the title said.

Both the sections of my story and HTQ4's "Ginger Gets a New Life" are up in the new Wordpress format. In fact, Chapter 2.2 of "Ginger" is now up, and is the latest content on there.

The RSS feed is here. I'll make it a little more obvious how to find that on the site proper.

Now we create the blog where I'll be posting my latest novel in installments. And the plates keep spinning.

P.S. For those of you still disgusting with the latest Spider-Man books, the latest Adventures of Li'l Squitch are here and here. And we're very grateful to Eye of Something Odd for playing the role of Li'l Squitch. Something Odd isn't forgotten, just dealing with shitstorms. You know how it goes.