Like many users, I use the pearLyrics widget for my Mac OS X Dashboard. It finds and displays lyrics for the track currently playing in iTunes, and will write the lyrics back to iTunes (iTunes has supported a “lyrics” tab in the info dialog for song files since version 5). Lyrics are found by searching a number of websites, and it’s been fairly accurate for me. The nice thing is that it happens automatically, so, slowly, as songs are being played, their lyrics are getting added to iTunes. Nice.
Well, apparently this is too easy for Warner/Chappell Music, because they have served the author of pearLyrics with a cease-and-desist letter. As a freeware author, he doesn’t necessarily have the means to fight the big music companies, so he’s decided to pull the App and Widget.
I’m not too sure how Googling for lyrics in Firefox is ok, but doing it programmatically from a widget is not ok, but it seems that Warner thinks that’s the case.
Yet another case of treating the customer as criminal. How much of this will consumers put up with?
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Anyone know where to download a copy of PearLyrics now that the company itself isn’t providing it? The hell with Warner.
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