“This is a sad time for all those of us with a passion for music and song lyrics. As of December 6th, 2005 pearLyrics is no longer available due to a cease and desist letter from Warner/Chappell Music Limited. As a freeware developer I can not afford to risk a law suit against such a big company, although personally I don’t see where pearLyrics should infringe any copyrights handled by them. After all pearLyrics only searches and accesses publicly available websites, displays, and, at the users wish, caches its content. Something that can easily be done with any combination of search engine and webbrowser too. Well, but I’m just a developer and not a lawyer,” Walter Ritter writes for pearworks.
“I feel very sorry for all users of pearLyrics who provided me with such great feedback – I would have loved to provide them with even further enhanced versions… A quick check at Apple’s widget download site also reveals that most of the lyrics widgets are gone now too,” Ritter writes.
Full article here.
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pearLyrics 0.5 freeware released: looks up lyrics for Apple iTunes songs – September 12, 2005
Is there anything at all left that a large company doesn’t want a piece of at our expense ….
Note that existing copies of pearlLyrics will continue to work function because the source websites are still up and running.
The widget/app should still work though shouldn’t it? They may have stopped his development and distribution, but it doesn’t sound like they’ve stopped existing versions from working. All we need is a mirror…
So, to summarise: type the lyrics in manually – won’t stop you.
Have them transferred from a website using an application – bad.
They haven’t shut down the sites which actually have the lyrics, merely C&Dd; the application.
Seriously, the music industry actually manages to disprove both the theories of evolution and Intelligent Design, although they do manage to provide empirical evidence of why close relations shouldn’t marry or have sexual relationships.
no wonder it wasn’t working
fsck Warner. Pear is awesome. I swear Im sick of big companies ruining everything that is good in this world.
WTF. If you are downloading the lyrics, that means that you already purchased the song – unless you are a criminal, and pirated the song from somewhere – that’s it – Warner has decided to punish all of the criminals, and all of the legitimate customers, too.
Now how am I supposed to sing along to Twista? Or is that illegal too?
boycott
I’m speechless. I wish I was rich and could help him hire a lawyer as this is ridiculous! I used that program to get the lyrics of over 2000 songs. Big Business. 🙁
I am so completely sick of this kinda crap.
CEOs make tens of millions of dollars a year–record-breaking profits–then layoff thousands because they say business is lagging. Greedy bastards.
Who is Pear hurting? Is this app snatching food from the mouths of Warner employees?
Ridiculous.
It’s really a shame that Warner and the music industry are putting so many road blocks to satisfy their greed. Instead Warner should encourage the youth and others music lovers to learn, share and appreciate music, one of the few and most beautiful pleasure of life.
Anyway, I’ll save my copy of pearLyrics.
Seriously, what was the problem here? I don’t get it. Exactly how does this app infringe on anything?
These guys should be shot. They deserve the pirating problem.
I put the pearLyrics widget in my Public folder
http://homepage.mac.com/dogfriend/FileSharing4.html
I wonder if I will get a C&D letter from Warner?
MCCR: Seriously, the music industry actually manages to disprove both the theories of evolution and Intelligent Design, although they do manage to provide empirical evidence of why close relations shouldn’t marry or have sexual relationships.
Seriously, this is really funny.
Anyway, I use KaraTunes in four or five languages. Most web lyrics aren’t perfect; even liner lyrics don’t account for the actual version sung in the cd.
So I guess this is our current boycott list
1: Sony products – Playstation 3 exempted because we hate M$ more.
2: Microsoft everything – turning a slight blind eye to those Mac users who are not technically up to speed to use anything else but OfficeMac.
3: Time/Warner music because of their latest BS.
If walter was doing such a good job that Warner noticed, why didn’t they buy his whole outfit for $US50,000 and pay him the same each year to maintain it with Warner advertising all over it.
The ‘good feel’ marketing appeal to users – priceless.
MW: ‘needs’ as in even Walter needs to eat too.
fsck U Time Warner!!
mirror of the widget here
(copied from dogfriend, use at own risk)
http://homepage.mac.com/hogfish/
this is a sad, sad day. the temptation of greed has really seeped into the minds and hearts of warner.
i wonder if anyone has version 0.6 somewhere that they can post… there were updates and sadly i find out only when they are forced to remove it!
Cheers Dogfriend.
The guy should just open-source the app. If he does, it will survive.
It’s because Warner has made very stupid business decisions the last several years, and has floundered with some of its most visible properties (i.e. Looney Tunes, DC Comics, etc.). Instead of looking at PearLyrics as a marketing opportunity, they shut it down outright and weather yet another barrage of negative publicity. It makes zero business sense, but who says you have to have business sense to be an executive?
dogfriend, you rock!
Thx.
“Who is Pear hurting? Is this app snatching food from the mouths of Warner employees?”
It’s not food from their mouths it’s coke from their noses and hookers from their, well, whatever.
Holy Mackerel… that made me think.
I would not put it past WB to come out with a system similar to pL. Give it a few months perhaps, and watch them tout a “new” service that you pay for (money, soul, ads.)
However, that would make Walter a happier (read: richer) man after a lawsuit… but that’s just a silly idea
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