Another Music Industry Crackdown

One of the “Big Four” record companies, Warner/Chappell Music, has gotten cease and desist orders issued against several developers of Mac freeware that searches the Web for song lyrics. Walter Ritter, whose pearLyrics application and widget automatically looks for song lyrics and then adds them to the lyrics field in iTunes, reports he’s been told to remove his software or face legal action. “As a freeware developer I cannot afford to risk a law suit against such a big company,” Ritter wrote on his Web site. He adds that his freeware only searches and accesses publicly available websites, which can also be done with any combination of a search engine and Web browser. “But I’m just a developer and not a lawyer,” he concludes. This latest action has also resulted in the disappearance of almost all the lyrics widgets from Apple’s Dashboard pages. Lyrics, as well as music, are protected under the US copyright law.