Copy and Paste

Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal reports today (subscription to the online WSJ required) that Yahoo has reached an agreement with a company named Gracenote to be able to offer online the lyrics to hundreds of thousands of songs owned by the 5 major music publishers. The only catch is that there is built-in technology that prevents anyone from copying and pasting the lyrics. The article's author considers this to be a bad decision by the music publishers. As librarians, we need to be concerned about how this sort of decision is going to affect the flow of information on the internet.