The NY Times' Bob Tedeschi has a very interesting article today on a small legal battle that has been going on without all the attention other lawsuits have received. Publishers, he writes about in "Now the Music Industry Wants Guitarists to Stop Sharing," "have used the threat of copyright lawsuits to shut down guitar tablature sites." (Tablature is guitar notation format that allows people to read music, so to speak, without reading music.)

One one side there's music publishers like Sony/ATV and EMI Music Publishing who are forcing sites to shut down because they are offering guitar tablature without paying royalties. On the other side are sites like Olga and Guitar Tab Universe that see their sites as forums for discussion amongst guitar players.

How will this play out? The experts are weighing in.

"Jonathan Zittrain, the professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, said 'it isn’t at all clear' that the publishers’ claim would succeed because no court doctrine has been written on guitar tablature.

Mr. Zittrain said the tablature sites could well have a free speech defense. But because the Supreme Court, in a 2003 case involving the extension of copyright terms, declined to determine when overenforcement or interpretation of copyright might raise a free speech problem, the success of that argument was questionable. 'It’s possible, though, that this is one reason why guitar tabs generated by people would be found to fit fair use,' Mr. Zittrain said, “or would be found not to be a derivative work to begin with.'"