Spin is about shifting the blame, or framing the issue — it rarely gets associated with accepting culpability and moving on.
Kudos to Warner/Chappell Music, for having the guts to admit it was wrong.
Last week, music publisher Warner/Chappell Music sent a threatening letter to independent Austrian programmer Walter Ritter, complaining about a free piece of software he’d developed that scoured Web sites for song lyrics and imported them into Apple Computer’s iTunes software.
The software was designed to find lyrics to the songs on your iPod, and download them so you could read along with your songs. Initially, Warner/Chappell saw this as a copyright violation, and sent threatening “cease-and-desist” letters.
Here’s a link to the apology, made public… and the parties may soon be in talks to work together on a way to do the same thing in a manner that doesn’t cloud the legal landscape.
Here’s the bonus — it’s not like Warner/Chappell had a lot to gain by pushing the issue. Others would have sprung up to do a similar thing in a different way, and corporate lawyers would have spent the next couple of years swatting flies. Rather than fight a Pyhrric battle, the company ended the fight without looking like a loser. By phrasing things toward collaboration and partnerships, they disengage as an equal.
“Sorry” can carry such a golden tune…
