International Lyrics Server

» see lyrics.ch as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

i pulled lyrics off half a dozen sites in the 1998-1999 window on a 33.6k ttnet line. lyrics.ch was one of the big ones. i did not know it was called the international lyrics server, i did not know it was one swiss guy, i did not know it was already under legal pressure. it was, alongside sing365 and songfile, one of the search results that came back when you needed to know the second verse of a song you had on tape.

the site was launched by pascal de vries in february 1997. he ran it as a hobby project on personal hardware with hosting at a small swiss provider. by late 1998 the database had grown past 100,000 songs, all typed in and submitted by users, and traffic had climbed to about one million pageviews a day, most of it from search engines pointing at specific song lyrics.

eight music publishers filed a criminal copyright complaint in the swiss courts in late 1998. on 14 january 1999 swiss police raided de vries's home and the datacenter at his hosting provider and took the servers. the site went dark the same day and never came back. it is the first mainstream lyrics takedown of the web era and the shape of every lyrics-database legal case that followed for the next twenty years.

~ the case file ~

~ the climb ~

the pre-lyrics.ch state of the internet was that if you wanted the lyrics of a song you owned on cassette or CD, you found a fan-made HTML page for a specific band and hoped the maintainer had transcribed that album. lyrics.ch was the first site that made lyrics a searchable database rather than a set of band-specific fan pages.

de vries built the system as a submission engine: users typed in lyrics for songs they knew and the server dedup'd and stored them. a search box on the front page fielded queries against the growing database. by 1998 it was doing what google would eventually do for the whole web: turning a fragmented set of hobbyist pages into a single addressable index.

~ the raid ~

the eight publishers who signed the complaint were led by polygram and EMI. their argument was that lyrics are copyrighted separately from the recording, and that swiss law gave the publishers criminal remedies against unlicensed distributors like de vries. de vries's defense was that the site ran non-commercially, with advertising covering hosting costs, and that transcribed lyrics submitted by users had never been treated as a criminal-copyright matter before.

the court did not have to decide the substantive question. the seizure of the equipment was enough to end the site, and the criminal complaint was later resolved without a public verdict. de vries did not restart lyrics.ch. the domain sat empty for years.

~ what carried over ~

the lyrics-search category came back very quickly. by 2001 azlyrics and lyrics.com and later lyricfind were running the same shape with better legal cover. lyricfind is now the main licensed source for google's inline lyrics panel; the model that lyrics.ch pioneered ended up licensed rather than eliminated.

the raid on lyrics.ch is worth remembering because it prefigures the 2000-2010 arc of the whole music-web collision: hobbyist site solves a real user problem before anyone licenses the underlying rights, publishers force a shutdown, ten years later the same problem is solved by a licensed successor that pays the publishers. lyrics.ch was the first time this pattern ran.

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