Whenever I would google a tab for a song, something from Ultimate Guitar would pop up toward the top 9/10 times. Now, nothing comes up in Google except a link to Ultimate Guitar search, not to the tabs themselves.
This change had to have happened in the last month or so…
I think it was part of Google’s recent initiative to eliminate copyright infringers from the results page. Online guitar tabs are legally just like pirating the CD. Unless you buy the printed book of tabs that was licensed by the band or record label.
I disagree. I don’t know anything about the legality of such sites but I can assure you there is a vast gulf between someone’s guess at the chords and burning a pirated CD. As someone who occasionally uses such sites I can relate that the songs “transcribed” are rarely correct. And anyway it’s just the chords, not all of the musical notation. If I was to guess, I’d say it’s more an infringement to post the lyrics.
I know that most of the drum tabs I used to look at got taken down a few years back. There was an announcement posted on the site to the effect that it was a copyright issue.
Absolutely. A significant proportion of online tabs are laughably wrong. It seems that anything beyond, say, a minor 7th chord is too harmonically subtle for your average internet tabber, so they’ll just throw in the nearest chord they know that sounds about right.
I agree with your disagreement. Several years ago, many tab sites closed down for a while, apparently due to threats from the publishing companies. I assume this was legally settled at some point because the sites have all popped back up. I agree that someone listening to a song and then printing their guess at how to play it is not a copyright infringement. And yes, most are either a little wrong, or a lot wrong.
Eh, seems like everyone’s just stringing him along. That’s just the tenor of this board, though. You couldn’t pick a worse group of people when it comes to this sort of thing.