Digital Home Thoughts: Legal Lyrics to be Available Soon

"U.S. digital entertainment company Gracenote on Thursday said it obtained licenses to distribute lyrics as music publishers mulled legal action against Web sites that provide them without authorization... Gracenote obtained the rights to the lyrics of more than 1 million songs from the North American catalogs of Bertelsmann AG's BMG Music Publishing, Vivendi's Universal Music Publishing Group, Sony/ATV Music Publishing, jointly owned by Sony and Michael Jackson, peermusic and other publishers. Gracenote also said it was talking with all of its partners, including Yahoo and Apple Computer's iTunes, about its plans to launch a service to offer legal and accurate lyrics for all digital media. The service, to be initially available in North America, would be the first industry-backed move to provide lyrics legally, Gracenote said. Until now, consumers' access to song lyrics has been largely through unauthorized sources, which usually provide inaccurate content, the company said."

I guess I knew that lyrics were copywritten works, but I guess I never thought of it as infringement if I looked up the lyrics online. Turns out it's infringement for fan sites to even list lyrics without permission from the artist and studio. As I said, it makes sense when you think about it, but it hardly seems worth fretting about. I guess it's nice to know that sometime soon official, correct lyrics will be available online, but I feel bad for the sites that have been faithfully helping me decrypt artists' lyrics for many years now. I think they deserve some compensation for doing the studios' job all these years. Like a free license to host lyrical content, so I don't lose my fan-based resources, which I prefer to support. What about you? Are you a frequent lyrics researcher? Are you happy to see official lyrics being made available, or sad to see your fan-based resources being taken down?