Has the record companies gone too far in an attempt to stop illegal music distribution?
Pearlyrics is a program that search for lyrics on public websites and view or add them to mp3 metadata and apparently it has nothing to do with illegal downloads. However, to prove themselves useful, the lawyers of Warner/Chapell music decided to send Walter Ritter, the author of Pearlyrics a cease and desist letter, claiming that the program has infringed their copyright.
This certainly has upset him, and consequently, he has to call it quit:
This is a sad time for all those of us with a passion for music and song lyrics. As of December 6th, 2005 pearLyrics is no longer available due to a cease and desist letter from Warner/Chappell Music Limited. As a freeware developer I can not afford to risk a law suit against such a big company, although personally I don’t see where pearLyrics should infringe any copyrights handled by them. After all pearLyrics only searches and accesses publicly available websites, displays, and, at the users wish, caches its content. Something that can easily be done with any combination of search engine and webbrowser too. Well, but I’m just a developer and not a lawyer.
Link: PearLyrics.
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