[TerriblySorry]

Is it a breach of copyright to post a quote from a song lyric? The Posting Rules warn against posting copyright material, so I was wondering.

 

[coolvij]

Oh come on.............if it is - SUE ME!!!!

 

[Braver]

exactly

 

[Neruda]

did anyone else hear about that guy in Australia who used a computer program to make melodies out of the sounds a phone makes? basically, the program turned the sound that you would make by dialing any phone number possible into a particular melody. Therefore, whenever you dial ANY phone number in the world, you're infringing on his copyright. there's a website out there, I can't remember the name of it, where you can hear your phone number and find out which "song" it is; there are billions and billions of them. So whenever you use your phone you have to pay this guy royalties! The good news: buying the rights to a certain phone number only costs 10 grand.

By the way, it's all meant as a joke, to make people rethink all this copyright crap. So don't worry.

 

[PC Corp]

oh, if my memory is correct, you can just change the song lyric a little bit, then there will be no copyright problem.

As long as they are not 100% the same, nobody can sue you.
Hopefully it's correct.
Otherwise, don't blame me if you end up somewhere.

 

[MacDEF]

Quote:

oh, if my memory is correct, you can just change the song lyric a little bit, then there will be no copyright problem. As long as they are not 100% the same, nobody can sue you. Hopefully it's correct. Otherwise, don't blame me if you end up somewhere.

Well, legally that's 100% inaccurate

If it's clear that you're only changing things to get around copyright, you can still be held liable for copyright violation.

That said, I don't know if anyone has ever been sued for copyright violation for reprinting song lyrics. Song lyrics are quite distince from "written word."

 

[huy_ha]

Then again, both Pete Seger and Bob Dylan are in the Norton Anthology of Poetry...

 

[Dusty Chalk]

One of my favorite lyrics servers, http://www.lyrics.ch/, went down because people stopped going because he had to put this stupid mechanism in place to track where it was being downloaded to.

OTOH, if you search on "lyrics" on, e.g., www.yahoo.com, you get all sorts of lyrics servers, so things may have changed since then. Which really sucks, because on www.lyrics.ch, you could search on them.

 

[raymondlin]

How can you breach copyright if you are not benifiting from the post? Financially or otherwise.

 

[neil]

The whole lyric site "hunt down" done by record companies is ridiculous. How can I possibly profit or benefit from having the song lyrics to a song on a CD that I purchased, other than being able to sing the correct lyrics instead of hmmming.. and hawwwing.. incorrectly?

By the way, I use Atomic Lyrics. They're a lyrics meta-search engine searching a ton of lyrics sites, not just a single database. You can search with wildcards (jenn*) and phrases ("john lennon"). I find these quite useful because artist names and lyrics are tough to search through without these tools.

 

[Dusty Chalk]

Copyright breach has nothing to do with the breacher benefiting from the actions. It only has to do with any infraction on the copyright holder's ability to benefit. So if you give away copies of Dilbert for free, even though you're not benefiting, you're still violating the copyright.