Copyright and Royalties
- See Royalties
Currently, there are many websites featuring song lyrics. This offering, however, is controversial, since some sites include copyrighted lyrics offered without the holder's permission. The U.S. Music Publishers' Association (MPA), which represents sheet music companies, launched a legal campaign against such websites in December 2005, the MPA's president, Lauren Keiser, said the free lyrics web sites are "completely illegal" and wanted some website operators jailed.
Lyrics licenses could be obtained in North America through one of the two aggregators; Gracenote Inc. and LyricFind. The first company to provide legal lyrics was Yahoo!, quickly followed by MetroLyrics and Lyrics.com. More and more lyric websites are beginning to provide legal lyrics, such as SongMeanings.
Many competing lyrics web sites are still offering unlicensed content, causing challenges around the legality and accuracy of lyrics. In the latest attempt to crack down illegal lyrics web sites a federal court has ordered LiveUniverse, a network of websites run by MySpace co-founder Brad Greenspan, to cease operating four sites offering unlicensed song lyrics.
Read more about this topic: Lyrics