Dev to Dev questions...

[toqer]

Hi there,

I don't know your name, but I work on the autOKdj karaoke program. Recently there's been a bunch of upheaval on the soundchoice forums about the following two press statements by Stellar and Sound Choice..

http://www.karaokestar.com/stelrecstat.html
http://www.karaokestar.com/sounchoicsta11.html

Basically they're saying our customers are criminals, and they're going to bust some ass.

You've been in karaoke software longer than we have, also you have a good line of communications with the people over at IP justice. Maybe you can pass this onto them for analysis, or maybe we can chip in 50/50 for the legal fee's.

Scenario: Karaoke companies claim they can cause us trouble because anything Sync licensed isn't included in fair use. Sync is for audiovisual work. CDG is a series of pictures, played back to back at high speed to create an animation.

Possible workaround: Distribute the lyrics in a non graphical format. I.E. a scripted subtitle system that works off plain text files (LRC comes to mind). Distribute lyrics seperately from the music. Since you're distributing text (non graphical) nobody can claim sync on it until it's actually synced to music. It would be the digital equivelent of cassette tapes and lyrics sheets.

Leave it up to the end user to decide how it's going to go from text > graphics.

If this is a legal loophole we can use to protect our users from karaoke producers, i'd be interested in discussing the format with you, and writing an open source rendering system.

I'm pretty sure we can count on the community to create LRC files for a paticular manufacturers music.

--toq