If you care about these things, you already know about
www.lyrics.ch and what happened to it. If you don't care
about these things, why are you reading this?
Okay, so once upon a time there was www.lyrics.ch, which was a massive Swiss
database with all the song lyrics you'd ever want. It was free, easy to use,
had a really powerful search engine, and basically did what the web was
supposed to do: provide information quickly, conveniently, and with total
disregard for the law.
Then the Harry Fox Agency stormed in, had the machines seized by the Swiss
Government, and kidnapped the guy running the server, exposing him to a variety
of unhealthy radioactive substances in order to pound his brain into
cooperation. At least, that's how I envision the whole thing happening.
The site's back up, and has been for a while. At the moment, it's not bad. You
can search for a song by keywords or phrases or whatever. Then, sometimes you
just can't get the lyrics to the song, and other times it passes you on to a
weird song lyric web site that flashes the lyrics in front of you, but a little
too fast to read.
Anyway, it's better than it was when it shut down, but compared to how it was
before all the legal wrestling and hairpulling, it still pretty much is a pale
and emaciated shadow of former glory. I'm glad the lyrics.ch guy did what he
could to get the site back up in the face of the Hounds of Destruction that are
Internet Copyright Lawyers, but I sort of wish he'd somehow like managed to
relocate the whole thing to a Pirate Island some place that doesn't honor U.S.
copyright laws.
