Copyright questions cloud future of free guitar tabs sites

[Kristijntje]

In late March, Musicnotes announced an agreement with the Harry Fox Agency to help us license guitar and drum tabs for the website www.mxtabs.net. Over the past two weeks we have received many phone calls from music publishers who received an e-mail communication from Hal Leonard Corporation (the world’s largest songbook publisher), outlining perceived problems with this new opportunity.

In this e-mail to music publishers, Hal Leonard Corporation questions the rationale behind Musicnotes’ online guitar tab licensing proposal. The e-mail includes a number of factual errors we need to address and was potentially very damaging to the work Musicnotes is doing for the writer and publisher community, and for our new company as well. The communication also misses the basic business point of our proposal: MXTabs.net aims to be a consumer-friendly site that generates meaningful incremental revenues for publishers and the songwriters they represent...

full statement: http://www.mxtabs.net/blog/2007/05/08/re...community/