User talk:SColombo

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Hi and welcome

nn = non-notable, but ignore the comments - I checked on Google after (should have check before making the comment) and I accept that he is reasonably well known.

Sorry for my rush to judgment, jimfbleak 19:15, 23 January 2006 (UTC)

1 Lyric Wiki
2 Lyric Wiki Article
3 User Box
4 Image file
5 LyricWiki

[edit] Lyric Wiki

Does lyrics wiki have permission to post lyrics off all the artists involved? The lyrics are copyrighted, and can't be linked to from Wikipedia unless they have permission! HawkerTyphoon 01:42, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

Yes, the lyrics are copyrighted, but we deal with publishers to pay royalties. Even if a publisher for certain lyrics has not contacted us or responded to our attempts to contact, they can at any time stake claims to their artists and we will track their work. The publishers I've talked to so far don't seem to mind the delay before they find us since only us and two other sites even pay royalties at all (and we actively email publishers asking for lists of the songs they have rights to publish). So yes, it's legal.

-SColombo 14:59, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I'm not sure if it is - do you have permission to post the copyrighted lyrics from all the artists? If not, we can't link to it. HawkerTyphoon 15:06, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I should stress that lyrics themselves are not illegal. I assure you I have looked into the legal aspects of posting lyrics and even took advice from WikiMedia's general counsel at Wikimedia 2006. It is a gray area, and the general thought by the legal community is that permission isn't needed to post lyrics, however there are some legal precedents which make it much safer to just pay royalties than risk a lawsuit down the road (which is what LyricWiki.org does). Copyright law (in the US at least, I haven't studied foreign law) doesn't state anywhere that lyrics are copyrighted. The arguement by the RIAA is that as soon as lyrics are written down they are copyrighted since everything written down is granted copyright. However, they are clearly making a stretch because it is well known that many artists never write their lyrics down. Obviously the RIAA (who even admits that they are not the ones to press charges... it would be publishers) would like to pretend even those lyrics are copyrighted, but has no official response for this doublethink.

We spend a significant amount of time contacting publishers and running a system to compensate them for with a rather hefty royalty. It is clearly impossible to make sure we have them all, however our efforts certainly qualify as due dilligence.

I have spent countless hours checking out the legal ramifications of LyricWiki as well as those of linking to it from Wikipedia. You are certainly not the first to bring this up, however, you are the first to remove the links before giving me a chance to explain the legal landscape (so much for WP:AGF). I'm not going around and spamming artist pages with links... I put one on Emo since LyricWiki's Category:Genre/Emo is well developed, and one on 'lyrics'. In the future I would ask that you please show the same respect back and not make legal assumptions (you are not a lawyer as far as I can tell). Thank you for your concern however.

-SColombo 19:31, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

I have a law degree (well, a half-law degree), although you're right, I'm not a lawyer. however, I'll ask you again, because I'm not sure if you've given me a straight answer (bear with me, I'm slow) - Lyrics are part of the song, and the song is copyrighted. You're right, it's a grey area, but grey areas are not something we like. If it's a grey areaa, we steer clear. Lyrics are easy to find on the internet at the drop of a hat, and the links serve to promote LyricsWiki. I know you're not spamming, and I know you mean well, but until the issue is no longer a grey area, I feel we should steer clear of it. i've removed many a lyrics site link in my time, because as a rule you need the artist's permission, or indeed pay them royalties, without them having to track you down first! HawkerTyphoon 20:02, 8 September 2006 (UTC)

The short and sweet: No, not all songs have permission from the publisher (the site would never have been able to reach critical mass otherwise as publishers wouldn't even respond to my emails and calls until LyricWiki had significant traffic). I don't see why you think grey-areas must be avoided, however. Brad Patrick (general counsel to WikiMedia) has stated that the vast majority of WikiMedia's operations are in a grey-area and that we have to get used to that idea. The laws are just plain vague about what is acceptable on many internet-related activities, and if we cower from all of them, we will be paralyzed from all action. WikiMedia has only been to litigation once in it's entire history (a victory in Germany), and there are many "grey-area" things that go on in the everyday transactions of Wikipedia (and their other wikis). It is a very low probability that anyone would ever try to sue LyricWiki even if they are one of the publishers who we can find on our own; the possibliity nears a nice round 0 that they would ever contemplate endangering Wikipedia just for having links to a site that is more likely than not on completely solid legal ground.

PS: Sorry, I didn't realize you were a 2L.

-SColombo 04:17, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Well, alright - you seem to have done your research, and you're sincere about this. Maybe you can create a template to LyricWiki? Ideally it'd be a plan to diversify your edits slightly though, as an account purely for advertising LyricWiki will raise a few eyebrows around the community! Have a fiddle around and see if you can get a template or the like created for it.

P.S. I'm not sure what a 2L is, but my degree is in Criminology, Criminal Justice and Law. Sort of a hybrid between the two - I can't be a solicitor, barrister - anything with it I'm afraid, only a critic on it all:P Best of luck! HawkerTyphoon 14:09, 11 September 2006 (UTC)

I think if the (half) lawyer friend was good enough to explain to the rest of us if the act of posting a link to some content on the WWW is considered illegal in any jurisdiction, given the content itself has not been obtained through legal means, this would have been resolved sooner. Oh, and before you say anything, I'd ask you to run a search on Google and go through the results it comes up with. 222.165.172.184 14:24, 23 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lyric Wiki Article

Well, it seems to me that this site is pretty much in the clear by agreeing to pay royalties (and rather exceptional in this regard). I didn't see the notability, but if you want to recreate it, the text is beow. I think it's going to get speedied, but you can recreate speedied articles if you want, and then it has to go to AfD. I suggest putting a note on the talk page about this interaction, and requesting not another speedy, but it goes to AfD if anyone wants to delete it. You might like to beef it up a bit. Tyrenius 11:55, 9 September 2006 (UTC)

Article text

LyricWiki is an ad-free wiki-based site with a collection of over 230,000 song lyrics, launched on 2006 by Sean Colombo, a student at Rochester Institute of Technology. A large part of the content available is collected by Web spiders.

External Links

Website-stub Category:Online lyrics databases

[edit] User Box

I don't contribute to Lyricwiki, but thanks anyway. I only added the template to be used in song articles because there are usually links to websites with popups and even dialers, so it's much more preferable to link to an almost ad-free website. Keep up the goodwork on Lyricwiki and Wikipedia. --Alexignatiou 10:48, 14 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Image file

You uploaded a file that was a derivative work of one of the Nuvola icons, and marked it as public domain. Given that the Nuvola icon set is licenced under the GNU Lesser General Public License, I have deleted that image as a copyvio. -- The Anome 18:17, 5 December 2006 (UTC)

I fixed it by uploading to wikimedia commons as LGPL. -SColombo 23:32, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] LyricWiki

Congrats, you've created a great site. But I have a question, is LyricWiki a Wikipedia:Sister projects? -- Walter Humala Godsave him! ^{(wanna Talk?)} 18:04, 12 February 2007 (UTC) Wikipedia is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, a non-profit organization that also hosts a range of other projects:

Commons Free media repository	Wikinews Free-content news	Wiktionary Dictionary and thesaurus
Wikiquote Collection of quotations	Wikibooks Free textbooks and manuals	Wikisource Free-content library
Wikispecies Directory of species	Wikiversity Free learning materials and activities	Meta-Wiki Wikimedia project coordination