h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

The Musicians Guild is officially back open for business today. Welcome back to all our old members!

Please note that there are important issues with regards to musical content at h2g2 right now. These are precipitated by h2g2's new status as a division of BBC Online. Auntie Beeb has policies in place regarding copyright that are more strict that we have been accustomed to in the past.

For instance, it is no longer an option to post song lyrics from copyrighted songs -- unless you also include a review of the song or other related commentary. If you include some commentary on the lyrics, your quotation is justified under the "fair use" loophole in international copyright law. If you don't include commentary, your lyrics could be removed.

Also, BBC Moderators have been deleting links to music resources outside h2g2 in some cases. In particular, BBC Online does not allow links to purely commercial enterprises. So you can't link to a page that does nothing but sell copies of Britney Spears' new album (or your own album, for that matter). The BBC Moderators will delete your link if you do.

Finally, you can't link to pages that commit copyright infringement. This includes unofficial sites that offer MP3 or other downloads without paying the artist, along with sites that offer up copyrighted images related to the group and/or complete song lyrics without commentary.

I know this makes it tough to link to music-related sites. And this has already been pointed out to employees of h2g2 as a possible longterm problem for our Researchers. If these rules are relaxed in any way, we'll pass the info on to you.

In the meanwhile, it might help to know that song titles, album lists, and other information about your favorite bands are still perfectly okay. And, of course, you don't need to worry the new rules when writing about musical works for which the copyright has expired. This includes lots of classical music, folk songs, and so forth.

For more info, scroll down to the section "What is Copyright" at http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/guide/A476138

There used to be a little known thread inhabited by a few researchers on the western spiral of this galaxy, where stood a pub before moderation (bm)in this pub stood a juke box where members could select there favorite artistes and sit, have a drink dance etc.
After moderation (am) this vanished and we are a bit upset at this. As we are not breaching copywrong by selecting artist and title could this get past the moderators, promise to keep all tuneless catawailing down to a minimum.

Listing title and artist shouldn't be a breash in copyright. Singing the lyrics, however, could be.

It's possible the jukebox is part of a very old thread that is among the 80,000 or so that the Moderators haven't checked over yet. If so, it will simply be a while before it is back.

You could always start another thread to last you until the original returns.

Well what about 'fair use' very few of the drunks in the juke box could remember many of the lyrics. but occasionaally one or two people mite remember a few verse's from bohemian rhaspody and exercise there vocals a bit.
Surely that amounts to fair use, after all we're not setting our selves up as the lyric version of napsta, and it also Fox up search engine results on many bands! Hee Hee!

I agree with you on fair use, Zarniwoop. I really do.

But BBC Online's ruling so far has been that it won't allow any song lyrics unless the post or entry's author also includes a review or timely commentary on what they have quoted. Simply posting the lyrics -- even only a line or two -- without commentary invites censorship from the BBC Moderators.