{"id":471,"date":"2006-08-21T18:02:31","date_gmt":"2006-08-21T22:02:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/08\/21\/bad-guitarists-of-the-world-unite\/"},"modified":"2006-08-21T18:02:31","modified_gmt":"2006-08-21T22:02:31","slug":"bad-guitarists-of-the-world-unite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2006\/08\/21\/bad-guitarists-of-the-world-unite\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad guitarists of the world, unite!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Courtesy of Kent Newsome’s blog<\/a>, I see that the recording industry — having obviously failed to find any more babies to poison or dogs to kick — is going after guitar tablature sites such as Olga, as chronicled<\/a> in the New York Times (as Slashdot points out, this isn’t the first time Olga has come under fire; the Harry Fox agency, which owns the publishing rights to most top hits, went after the tab site in 1998<\/a>). <\/p>\n

Like many other professional and amateur guitarists, including Kent, I have used Olga.net for years to find transcribed music that I am trying to learn (in my case, so that I can play old John Prine songs out on my back porch or at a campfire, rather than having to play Leaving On a Jet Plane or whatever my friends really want me to play). In many cases the music that I would come across was wrong or incomplete, but invariably someone would correct it, or post a different file so people could try them both. Kind of like an early version of social networking.<\/p>\n

The industry (which comes under some heavy fire from J. Botter here<\/a>), is arguing that tabs are a “derivative work,” and therefore are an infringement of the original artist’s copyright. Sadly, at least one lawyer (and guitarist) thinks that they might be right<\/a>, and that the principle of “fair use” might not be enough to allow Olga and other sites like it to survive. I hope that he is wrong. <\/p>\n

I think Thomas Vander Wal is right when he says this it is just another example of the tension between sharing and owning<\/a>. More discussion here<\/a>. And in a crashing irony, Joe Gratz — a recent law-school graduate — says the original closure of Olga was one of the things that got him interested in studying copyright law<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Courtesy of Kent Newsome’s blog, I see that the recording industry — having obviously failed to find any more babies to poison or dogs to kick — is going after guitar tablature sites such as Olga, as chronicled in the New York Times (as Slashdot points out, this isn’t the first time Olga has come … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Bad guitarists of the world, unite!”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-471","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=471"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/471\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=471"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=471"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=471"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}