A scraper for https://www.ultimate-guitar.com
I recently received an email from Max Chistyakov, developer at Ultimate Guitar who asked me to shut down this project. It was a fun project to work on but since I don't when any trouble I am applying to his request.
From <m.chistyakov@ultimate-guitar.com>
Date: 2019-01-28, 07:07 EST
Hi,
I'm Max Chistyakov, Ultimate Guitar developer. Our company found your
scapper: https://github.com/masterT/ultimate-guitar-scraper
I need to tell you how ultimate-guitar works. First of all, all tabs on
ultimate-guitar are legal. We pay roaylties to music publishers (Alfred,
Sony, EMI, etc.) for each tab. If user see ads, we got money from ads
and transfer money to publicher. If user buy subscription, we send money
from subscription to publishers. So, ultimate-guitar is just platform
between music publishers and guitarists. You can read more how licensing
works here: https://www.ultimate-guitar.com/article/blog/licensing
You created scapper to parse ultimate-guitar.com, nice job. I especially
admire how quickly you react to changes in our API (Continuous
Integration is always good idea). But your scapper is illegal. Creating
software to free show guitar tabalatures/sheetmusic and free
distribution it is illegal. You can read how few popular websites was
closed due DMCA
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-line_Guitar_Archive,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mxtabs
So, I decide to reach you before lawyers and publishers start working
and physically found you. I recommend you to delete public repo and npm
package. May be formatting your disk will be nice for you too.
As developer I'm sorry it happened. But the music industry works that way.
Max
There are alternatives you can find on GitHub.