Shop Talk – Guitar Wars
by Bobby McGill
Guitar Wars
Bobby McGill
OLGA, an acronym for the OnLine Guitar Archives (http://www.olga.net), was until recently hosting a popular web site that featured both tabulature and chord transcriptions for over 30,000 popular songs – free of charge. The varied submissions, spanning nearly all of the musical spectrum, were contributed over the years by thousands of amateur musicians world wide who transcribed the songs for posting, thus allowing even the tone deaf to belt out a favorite tune with relative ease.
Since their inception in the early ’90s, sites like OLGA, and its counterpart GuitarTabs.Com (www.guitartabs.com), have proved invaluable to the myriad of emaciated musicians out there who can’t afford both strings and sheet music. Enter, Goliath.
Recently, citing blatant copyright infringement, the Harry Fox Agency (HFA), acting as the legal arm of the National Music Publishers Association, gave OLGA its walking papers, insisting that its continued operation would result in severe legal action. GuitarTabs.Com soon thereafter received a similar dictate from Warner Bros. (WB) who tersely stated their desires in less than ambiguous terms: “Having no record of giving such authorization to you with respect to our compositions, we would respectfully demand that you discontinue your infringing activity.”
Both sites, wishing to avoid a heated legal battle, closed shop. The HFA and WB maintain that OLGA, and GuitarTabs.Com infringe on the royalties of the song’s writers and publishers. Though no money changes hands at either of the sites, HFA and WB contend that both deplete the revenue they might otherwise receive from sheet-music sales. Refusing to go quietly, OLGA has recently taken some creative measures to fight back. Shortly after it shut the archives down, OLGA incorporated itself into a non-profit agency. Seems fairly harmless at first glance, but bear in mind, so did David standing there with a sling and a small stone.
John Nielands, who plays guitar for a Pittsburgh band called the Raving Jehovahs (how’s that for Biblical context?), also doubles as the public relations director for OLGA. According to Nielands, since OLGA is a non-profit entity, it should fall under the “fair use” exception of U.S. copyright law. Looking at it from this legal perspective, OLGA’s primary use can be viewed as an “educational tool,” similar to a library on the Internet. “Our status as a non-profit essentially formalizes what OLGA has always been: an organization of guitarists giving their time and effort to educate other guitarists,” said Nielands. Pete Allen, of GuitarTabs.Com concurs: “It is freedom of distribution of information. I think [HFA and WB] are going to have a tough fight over that.”
Whatever munitions that OLGA can gather for its sling, it will be fighting the battle on its own. According to Allen, GuitarTabs.Com will not contest the copyright infringement charges. “We’re not pursuing it a whole lot because we don’t have the funds to fight it,” he said from his home outside of Cleveland, Ohio. Though a bit discouraged, Allen hopes that those who benefited most from free sites such as his over the years will help out in what could shape up to be a costly legal battle.
“Any money that anyone would have spent on sheet music, I suggest sending it in as a donation to OLGA instead.” He added that they will offer OLGA support by encouraging visitors to the GuitarTabs.Com site to sign a “save OLGA” petition at the archive-less OLGA web-site, and to write both the Harry Fox Agency and Warner Bros. in support of the OLGA’s cause as well. ◼
