pearLyrics Gone (part 1)
One of the best widgets for Mac OS 10.4+ was pearLyrics. It basically ran in the background (via Dashboard) and silently updated your iTunes library with the lyrics for the current playing song with user interaction.
Unfortunately, all good things come to an end, it seems. Walter, the developer of pearLyrics, was issued a cease and desist order from Warner/Chappell Music because it is apparently “illegal” to search the web for lyrics and save them to MP3 files (from my understanding of the order, though no direct details of the cease and desist order were made public). In addition to that, many of the widgets similar to pearLyrics are now gone from Apple’s download website. Could those developers, who were simply searching the web, scraping webpages, and saving the data to iTunes audio files, also have been issued cease and desist orders? More than likely. It’s truly a shame that Warner/Chappell Music has taken this action against software that neither promotes nor encourages piracy of ANY sort.
Truly a shame – yet another instance of a big corporation issuing cease and desist orders as if it was a party and everyone was invited. It’s hard to believe that they, Warner/Chappell Music, understand the stupidity of issuing such an order to a freeware developer who has done nothing illegal nor wrong.
Posted: November 30th, 2005 under Apple.
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