Speaking to the BBC, the president of US trade group the Music
Publishers Association, Lauren Keiser, said that the campaign would
target “very big sites that people would think are legitimate and
very, very popular".
He indicated that he would be seeking jail sentences for site
owners, along with fines and enforced website closures.
Last week, music-publishing firm Warner Chappell forced freeware
developer Walter Ritter to withdraw his pearLyric software – which
until 6th December helped Mac users find song lyrics for whatever
song they were playing in iTunes. Song lyrics were fetched either
directly from the music file via iTunes, from text files in a local
directory, or were searched and fetched from publicly available
websites.
The developer received a “cease and desist” letter from the
firm. As Ritter said in a website posting, “I can not afford to
risk a lawsuit 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,” he added.
The new campaign follows a much-publicised industry crackdown on
file sharing – where music fans use peer-to-peer software to
illegally share copyrighted digital music files.
