| From the Where2sing.com forum: I'm bringing a topic here from the AskDavid forum - it's about copyright.
Two people posted the lyrics to songs, and I removed them from the AskDavid forum citing 'copyright infringement'; this topic of websites' illegally posting lyrics of songs was covered in a couple of W2S feature stories some months back - essentially, don't be fooled by the number of websites dedicated to reproducing song lyrics, because this is still illegal. And song publishers are considering suing the website owners for infringement of copyright.
It was suggested in the AskDavid forum that putting quotation marks around the song lyrics posted in that forum would make them legal (perhaps also correctly attributed), and I suggested that it is unlikely that lyrics websites and those considering suing them have overlooked this solution.
My understanding is that quotation marks and properly attributing a piece of work is done to avoid plagiarism, so that what you are quoting is not mistaken for your own idea. And that there is no legal penalty for plagiarism - just social condemnation.
However, my understanding of copyright laws is that the circumstances are somewhat different from plagiarism - in that a body of work is reproduced without the permission of the copyright holder. In the case of the lyrics posted into the AskDavid forum, I think this was clearly a copyright issue, as the whole of the lyrics was posted without the permission of the copyright holder; certainly there was no suggestion of plagiarism that might be negated by the use of quotation marks, as there was no suggestion by thost posting that the lyrics were their own work.
A host then suggested that we may have a lot of trouble with plagiarism in spoken conversations because it's difficult to insert quotation marks into thin air - and he is quite correct. However, in normal conversation I guess we presume that most ideas have been read or heard somewhere before, and we probably rarely quote them verbatim. And in the case of public speakers, they will normally attribute exact quotes to the relevent source.
Another host then suggested that, if there's a copyright issue here, that we're all going to be in a lot of trouble singing songs at karaoke - and I guess I wonder whether this host has not heard of the APRA licences that govern such subjects, and of the illegality of burnt discs? But then again, I recently heard of a host who refused to playa burnt disc and was then over ruled by the management of the venue.
So, hoping that this is a workable precis of the debate so far, does anyone have anything to add, or to contradict, what I've written here?
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