Apparently to some people in the recording industry, there isn’t much difference between posting lyrics in a place that won’t make money and using them for commercial purposes. That’s a little disappointing, but I can kind of understand why they might not have the lyrics out there.

Thanks for sharing the news, Nate!

Lots of the U2 fan sites got letters from Universal this week, threatening legal action unless they took down the lyrics on their sites. What’s distressing about this is that the fan-site lyrics were generally taken from the actual recordings, and so differed from the printed lyrics included with the albums. On the fan sites, you got the correct lyrics as performed, including changes and variations from live performance.

I don’t plan to take my lyrics down. They are part of my legitimate research project on religion, culture, and politics, and as such seem to constitute fair use, as far as I can tell.

there’s a huge difference between quoting lyrics on a free-for-the-world blog and quoting them in a book you’re going to get paid to publish. I think the Radiohead charges were insane, frankly, but if we start censoring ourselves because of fear of nebulous laws that we’re not even sure we understand [much less with no good precendent cases] we do ourselves and our patrons a disservice. Or get around it like I do, and just quote Thoreau a lot