Warner/Chappell Music Limited threats illegally

PearLyrics is a program that displays the lyrics of the currently-playing track in iTunes: it gets the lyrics from the ID3 tag in the MP3 file, or if they aren't in there, it searches for them on a few different web sites, and then saves them into the MP3s.

Or was.

The developer said:

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.

I understand him, really. He just don't want to be messed and scared by such idiotic big Co's. But, as for myself, I think that someone should grab the latest available version of it, check it's license, and, if compliant with it's license, fork it and let their users keep on using it.

Actualy, in having the time for it I would do it myself.

If those Warner fuckers mess with the forkers, they sould say something like "there's nothing illegal on redirecting webcontents, if you think that those lyrics shouldn't be publicly available, sue the website owners".

PERIOD.