The International Lyrics Server was a Swiss web site devoted to hosting song lyrics, entered and updated by its users worldwide. Begun in February 1997, it was hosting over 100,000 songs and receiving a million page views every day by its close in 1999. It is remembered as a pioneer of the concept of crowdsourcing... useful and informative web sites created by the efforts of many anonymous, volunteer contributors (a leading example of which is this Wikipedia).
The service also presaged the music industry's approach of welcoming the Internet with a barrage of lawsuits. Although its creator Pascal de Vries claimed no intent to commercialize the service, his move to accept advertising to help cover the costs of running the system allowed the argument that he was profiting from the industry's intellectual property. On January 14, 1999, Swiss police raided de Vries' apartment and the service's ISP and seized equipment in pursuit of a criminal copyright violation complaint filed on behalf of eight music publishing companies including Polygram, EMI, and Estefan Enterprises. Although the industry succeeded in taking down this service (and turning many music fans to dislike the industry), the Internet proved more powerful than the industry, and song lyrics are now freely available on many similar sites.