Build Date: Wed Apr 15 00:20:07 2026 UTC
Always remember that I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me.
-- Winston Churchill
Internation Lyrics Server still kinda sucks
1999-12-11 17:32:56
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.

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