Radiohead sites Green Plastic and At Ease are the kind of fan pages most bands only wish they had: well-organized, comprehensive, articulate, and backed up by ferociously loyal communities. They've enjoyed great relationships with Radiohead and with EMI, Radiohead's record label.
Too bad that copyrights to the underlying musical composition don't belong to EMI or to Radiohead, but to Warner Chappell, who publish Radiohead sheet music. And Warner Chappell has been sending out cease-and-desist letters to sites with lyrics and guitar tabs. (To be nit-picky, the tabs are probably derivative works and therefore not owned by anyone, but they're still infringing, as OLGA learned.) Green Plastic promptly pulled the lyrics and tabs; for now they're still up at At Ease.
In a real departure from typical cases of this sort, however, everyone involved is being courteous about the matter. Further details inside.
The cease-and-desist letter said:
More than that, the availability of these files have a direct impact on our ability to market and sell our musical arrangements and songbooks, and that adversely affects the royalties that we are able to generate and pay to the band.
May we count on your cooperation?
That's the cease-and-desist equivalent of a love letter. The webmasters have been pleading with readers not to get too angry at Warner Chappell. Radiohead, never a band given to angry bluster, "isn't happy" with the situation and is seeing what they can do (legally, I'd guess not much, but they can threaten to find a new publisher). Most remarkably, Warner Chappell may reconsider its stance:
[O]ur ultimate goal in all of this is to insure that they are happy in their relationship with Warner/Chappell. If the band wants their fans to have access to their song lyrics, then that's what we will allow ... after all, it's their music."
We'll see.
In terms of further links, there's an online petition that's a bit less friendly about the matter. Internet Magazine has a story. And perhaps someone might want to forward the actual letter to Chilling Effects
We'll give the last word on this story to Radiohead themselves. This is, after all, a band that responded to the early Internet leak of an early version of their latest album by saying such things as "I'm glad people like it." As they wrote in the liner notes to OK Computer:
all songs are published by warner chappell ltd. lyrics used by kind permission even though we wrote them.