Do you read song lyrics online? Maybe not for long

By Eriq Gardner

Read lyrics to your favorite songs online while you still can.

That's probably a little alarmist, but a federal court in California is being asked to order LiveUniverse, which maintains several websites that display song lyrics, to transfer ownership of the sites to music publishers. 

In August 2009, PeerMusic, Warner/Chappell and Bug Music filed copyright infringement lawsuits against LiveUniverse, alleging infringement for the posting of lyrics. This May, a federal court issued an injunction, ordering LiveUniverse to remove unlicensed material from its website. The defendant didn't, leading to a contempt order.

Last month, the district court ordered LiveUniverse to disable the websites altogether. That still hasn't been enough to get LiveUniverse to do much.

So yesterday, attorneys for PeerMusic asked that a court grant them domain control over lyricsdownload.com, completetealbumlyrics.com and lyricsandsongs.com.

Earlier in the week, the judge ordered the defendants to pay fees and costs for repeated failures to complete discovery obligations.