pearLyrics is a program that displays song lyrics for whatever song you are currently playing in iTunes. Sometimes these lyrics are embedded in the mp3 file itself, and if not, pearLyrics looks to public sources on the internet to see if it can find the lyrics. If it finds them, and if the user instructs it to do so, pearLyrics will cache the lyrics for use the next time the song is played.

Sounds like good software. Instead of going to these websites yourself, copying the lyrics and using an mp3 encoding tool to put them onto your mp3 file, pearLyrics does it for you.

So what justifies the cease and desist letter sent by Warner/Chappell Music Limited demanding that the software no longer be offered to the public? What is so threatening to them that they felt it necessary to use their over-bloated legal department to sit down upon and crush another creative initiative to use technology for enjoying music? Frankly, I don't get it. The program can't possibly be blamed for doing anything illegal. It is nothing more than a specialized web browser that knows to visit certain public sites, look for certain keywords and extract a portion of the information contained there within. How can that possibly be illegal?

Even if one could manage to do something illegal with this program, that is no reason to forbid its use or distribution. Guns and knives are still distributed, and people can do illegal things with Internet Explorer.

This, to me, is clearly a case of Warner Music using scare tactics because they want to control everything. It is just one more futile attempt to protect an outdated business model and try to convince people that combining the Internet and music in any way is morally wrong and illegal. I think they're full of shit. Show me Warner products so I know what not to buy as Christmas presents.

From Walter, author of pearLyrics:

This is a sad time for all those of us with a passion for music and song lyrics. 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.