Because tabs for pretty much anything are fairly easy to find nowadays... except even better: dynamic tabs are very much in the vogue now (tabs with multiple tracks that you can instantly play and verify if itβs good by how it sounds). You can loop certain parts, slow them down, etc for effective practicing.
The main program I used was TuxGuitar [1]. I felt it suited my purposes - I could work out the rhythm and positioning with this program and play files in various formats. The sound quality and features were adequate - sort of a low-fi MIDI sound where different timbres and instruments could be selected. It looks like it may not be a maintained product, but the source is available if you want to tinker with it [2].
Another program that my friends used to use is Power Tab. The original programs look to be abandoned, but it seems that an open-source implementation is actively maintained here. [3]
There is a commercial product called Guitar Pro, but I felt the open-source packages were good enough. Guitar Pro also had an active community (maybe it still does), and many users would contribute their own tabs in Guitar Pro's file format (.gp3, .gp4, etc.) which I would read and edit with TuxGuitar. It used to be pretty easy to find these files available online, but I suspect copyright holders cracked down on these communities much like they did with OLGA.
(Disclaimer: I help make it)
https://theriffrepeater.com/rocksmith-announces-new-rocksmit...
And then, to further the travesty, those freely contributed tabs were hoovered up by commercial sites and became only available there.
I think that the situation is like this. The music publishers' whole assertion was that, because of licensing laws around sheet music, the tabs were not so much illegitimate as inherently owned by the publishers. Regardless of who created them or how. Thus OLGA couldn't publish them without licensing them. (And OLGA couldn't afford the licenses, obviously.)
But since -- again, under the publishers' legal theory -- the tabs are owned by the publishers, they could license the tabs to whoever they liked. Such as these new leeches.
And no one has had enough interest to challenge this state of affairs. It would probably take some kind of class action, gathering up a bunch of the tab authors. And I have no idea if that fight is even feasible under existing law.
This isn't a crazy outcome and it matches up well with traditional property laws. For example, suppose Olga came to my house without my knowledge, mowed my front lawn for me, and then I come home and I eject her for trespassing. In that case I still get to enjoy my nicely mowed front lawn (i.e., the product of Olga's labor) and Olga doesn't have any right to payment because we didn't have any kind of agreement. (Note: This actually happens sometimes when painters paint the wrong house. The owner getting a free paint job is less bad than forcing the owner to pay something he didn't bargain for.)
Yeah, but copyright is not a form of traditional property right. Intellectual "property" rights are better thought of as intellectual monopolies granted for a limited time, and this is important because intellectual works have some very different properties that separate them from physical property.
For instance, in your examples, the lawn mower cannot easily "un-mow" the lawn nor the painters "un-paint" the house. Any attempt to do so would be labor intensive. However, in the OLGA copyright case, the publishers can trivially force the infringers to no longer publish the tabs, undoing any further damage. In the lawn mower and house painting case, the labor is fundamentally tied to the physical property being infringed. However, with intellectual property, this is explicitly not the case. The tabs do not alter the original song in any way, they are merely a derivative work.
To be explicit, while the transferal of rights over the tabs to the copyright holders may be granted by a judge as part of reparation of harm done, I see no reason that the music publishers should presume to own the rights outright without the intervention of a court.
For one final example as to why we should not conflate intellectual works and physical property, if I were to trespass onto your land and paint a beautiful painting of your landscape (with supplies I own) and then leave without causing damage, do you... own the painting? Just own the copyright? Own none of it? It is definitely not clear to me that you should automatically own my painting, even if I infringed your property rights by trespassing.
If the tabs do not alter the original song in any way, then they are more like a literal copy than a derivative work. A literal copy, even one that took a long time to make, will not contain any separately copyrightable elements. A derivative work, however, may contain its own separately copyrightable elements, even if it was made without permission. For example, Fifty Shades of Grey started out as a Twilight fanfiction by E. L. James called Master of the Universe. James could not publish Master of the Universe without infringing the Twilight elements owned by Stephanie Meyer. But nor could Meyer publish Master of the Universe without infringing E. L. James's copyright in the elements that didn't come from Twilight.
> the transferal of rights over the tabs to the copyright holders may be granted by a judge
It is unlikely that a court would ever transfer title from an infringer to a copyright owner because (1) it's not necessary, and (2) in the case of a derivative work it may be unjust. To continue my prior example, if Stephanie Meyer had sued E. L. James for publishing Master of the Universe, it would have been unjust for a court to transfer title to her because the infringing derivative work contained copyrightable elements separate from those created by Stephanie Meyer. Usually a court will just order payment of damages (money), except where damages alone would be unjust. In the case of a settlement, however, the parties may agree to whatever terms they want.
Here, as I understand it, the tabs do not contain copyrightable elements separable from those owned by the composer. If a tab contained an adaptation of one instrument to a different instrument or an adaptation of several instruments to a solo instrument, then there may be some separate copyrightable elements in that adaptation. However, if the tabs are merely one-to-one transcriptions of the guitar part of the original composition, then once you take away the original composition there is nothing left that is separately copyrightable. If that is the case, then the tab creators have no rights, even though they spent time and effort in the transcription.
> if I were to trespass onto your land and paint a beautiful painting of your landscape
This example is easy to answer. I wouldn't own the painting because it was merely left on my property (technically, I would be called an involuntary bailee). I wouldn't own the copyright to the painting because I didn't paint it. If the landscape is natural, then I don't own any copyright in it because I didn't create it (in copyright terms, I'm not the author). The landscape might include something copyrightable, however, perhaps a sculpture that I created. In that case the painting may infringe on that copyright, but I would have to make the usual arguments (literal copying, substantial similarity, etc.) and you would make the usual defenses (fair use, etc.).
It isn't a crazy outcome in the context of current IP law. I personally think it's an outrageous outcome and shows a clear weakness of that state of law.
Could you say exactly what you find outrageous about it? Is it the idea that someone could spend a lot of time and effort on something only to find out that the product of their work has no value?
Song melodies are copyrightable, as are recordings, and lyrics. But chord progressions are not. So a guitar tab containing only chords (not lead melodies) and no guide lyrics sounds to me like it ought to be entirely fair to publish. Of course, many tabs include lyrics or other elements that verge into copyright infringement, but the idea that all tabs are necessarily derivative from the original song and subject to its copyright sounds wrong on the face of it.
Thank you for analyzing. This gives fantastic context into the problem he had with his lack of copyright knowledge.
The big issue I have here is he was navigating a minefield. He and people like him are the reason YouTube exists. There has to be a better way of what YouTube is doing than just a "if you trip up a minor easily exploitable offense you are gone".
His sob story definitely left details out, but this is the way of YouTube. And YouTube gives no real support unless you go viral with your sob story.
So in the end... This is just fucking terrible.
I can't remember if the issue was a sudden spike in traffic or legal threats but I do remember that it was taken down. Still, compared to the sort of repercussions we take for granted nowadays, it almost seems quaint that all he got was a slap on the wrist and it had to be taken offline.
From there, it should be possible to mangle it into a tabulature?
Does that exist on github? Could be an instant olga without copyright violations.
What you expect not to be too hard to do, is actually the 'holy grail' of the field - Algorithmic Melody Transcription is the kind of thing people write entire papers on[0].
[0]: https://www.ee.columbia.edu/~dpwe/pubs/PolEFGSO07-meleval.pd...
There are a few toy examples if you search "algorithmic music transcription github," one of the better-known ones is [1] (but it's limited to piano music). They're all pretty nascent. It's a real hard problem :)
[1]: https://github.com/rachhshruti/automatic-music-transcription
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cBDJDZAo41c
> From there, it should be possible to mangle it into a tabulature?
A produced pop track might be a little extreme, but there's a lot going on in these tracks. Even if you know the chord progression, it's hard to tell if a note played by a guitar is played by the rhythm guitar, lead guitar, an overdub, something with double tracking, or even an overtone from the bass, especially when the note makes the chord an add4. The same goes for walking basslines played by the guitar.
You also arrange things differently for solo performances, live performances with a band, and produced performances, so even if you could extract a rhythm guitar tab from a recording, that might not be how you'd want to play it solo.
Back then:
- https://youtu.be/8zeLKMHxbN8?t=561
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJ2lWslJVOc
Now:
1) he wrote out the tabs himself instead of copying them from a copyrighted book and
2) he wasn't making any direct money by selling the tabs themselves; however he also acknowledges was getting indirect money via Youtube monetization of the videos that displayed the tabs on screen
Unfortunately, he was naive and probably wasn't aware of history. Back in the USENET days, the famous OLGA On-line Guitar Archive[1] was previously shutdown even though the guitar tabs contributions were made by volunteers for no money.
He was playing with copyright fire and didn't know it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-line_Guitar_Archive