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Recently the axis of evil, the National Music Publishers Association (NMPA) the Music Publishers Association of the United States (MPA) and the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) have shut down many guitar tab sites on the internet. For some of you, this is old news, for others, let me enlighten you. I've only been playing guitar for 2 1/2 years now and I'd like to think that I'm getting pretty good at it now. I can guaranty that I wouldn't be half as good as I am now without these tabs and I probably would have lost interest very early on without them. They are an essential part of any guitarist's ability to learn music, no matter what your skill level.

Bottom line, these tabs are not official song sheets ripped directly from songbooks with a hefty price tag, but they are individual guitarist's interpretations of the songs themselves. It's somebody like you or I who have put in their time and really learned their stuff and decided to make the job a little easier for the beginners and the not-so-musically-inclined. To sue these sites would be akin to suing you for copyright infringement for singing Panic at the Disco in the shower or Gnarls Barkley at your local Karaoke bar. Besides... The tabs created for programs like Power Tab and Guitar Pro make for a learning experience that a songbook could never possibly provide and there isn't any alternative to these programs as of yet.

Songwriters also get paid from the everyday jobs they do, just like you and I, and aside from some of the larger names, it has always been this way and guitar songbooks did nothing to change this. On top of the recording industries price gouging, you’ve also now added material costs of the book and the book publishers price gouging, not to mention the price gouging that the retailer does. If MySongBook was posting net profits, then there would indeed be a problem here, but they have very little advertising to speak of and it pays for the bandwidth and moderation of the site. Until a rich philanthropist like Bill Gates hosts a site like this out of the goodness of his heart, these sites will have to contain some form of advertisement to pay for bandwidth or they would be extinct.

I hope in the near future technology will allow us to completely cut out the middleman and the consumers can deal directly with the creative talent. The RIAA, MPAA, NMPA & MPA are well aware of this possibility and they are doing everything in their power to make sure that this is a legal impossibility before the technology and social climate allows for it to truly take off. It is sad that they use the artists and the songwriters as the pity pot here and so many people seem to buy their distorted version of reality.

There are a lot of people in America that are struggling to pay any of their bills. I happen to be a bit more fortunate then the poverty stricken, but I am not rich by any means. For the truly destitute who often find solace in drug abuse or violence, think of how much more enriched their life might have been if they had been given a guitar when they were a child that loved life along with a treasure trove of information to get them on their way to having a musically enhanced life. Before the recording industry had everyone in America listening to the same 50 bands at one time, there were traveling performers everywhere. People were more interesting and there was much more variety in life all around us. What the recording industry and their copyrights have done is stifle and destroy much of the creative juices of the masses which once made this country great. Now we all listen to the same stuff and buy the same stuff and are taught from childhood to do the best we can to conform to those around us.

Back in 1971 George Harrison was sued by Bright Tunes Music Corp because his song “My Sweet Lord” sounded similar to that of a song they owned called “He’s So Fine” which was written by Ronald Mack, and recorded by the Chiffons in 1962. Incidentally, Bright Tunes Music Corp wasn’t even the original producers of “He’s So Fine”. George Harrison lost this case in court and was forced to pay Bright Tunes $1,599,987, not only the earnings from that song, but earnings from other songs on the album that weren’t as popular that got sold, in the judges eyes, because of the popularity of “My Sweet Lord” which was ripped off from “He’s So Fine”. These are two very different songs, and it’s kind of scary when you think that creativity can be legislated in such a bogus way as this and be labeled as “PLAGERISM”, yet I have to hear the exact background beat on Puff Daddy’s “Satisfy You” as I do on Luniz’ “I Got 5 On It”. (And I know I’ve heard it in one or two others already). Modern watered down hip-hop is based on “Sampling” and is so blatant most of the time that it doesn’t take a judge to know that the tune was a rip off. What about Rhianna’s “S.O.S.”? I have to admit that I enjoy her shaking her thing on the video much more than I enjoyed the video for the song when Soft Cell made it in the 80’s and it was called “Tainted Love”, but this is honestly a much more blatant form of plagiarism and I haven’t heard anything about Rhianna or P Diddy going to court. This is because the record industry owns the rights to these songs and as long as they are making the money, they’ll use that same beat for 100 more songs over the next millennia, and they will label it benignly as “SAMPLING”. They own the copyrights on creativity now and they decide who can and who cannot be creative.

As I posted on my MySpace blog (http://www.myspace.com/6ixstringjack), I will be hosting all of my guitar tabs (somewhere around 100,000) in zipfiles which I will host on Rapidshare. I will make these available to anyone who wants them for free, and I hope that anyone intersted in music will download these for themselves if they play or for any of their familys and friends to use and to pass on. I wanted to post here to see what people thought about this idea as I have a limited audience on my MySpace blog. I will most likely be hosting these by Wednesday night and I will post the link here and on my blog then. According to some know-it-all lawyer that I saw posting in here on another thread reguarding this, as long as I'm not making any money off of these, it's not illegal for me to do this, and even if it is, I'm willing to be a martyr for the cause.

They can sue us till we're pennyless, but they can't stop the music.