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By Sally Watson, 20 January 1999 18:13

NEWS A Web site containing the lyrics to over 100,000 songs has been shut down after police raided its offices and confiscated two servers. The International Lyrics Server, based in Basel, Switzerland, provided a database of lyrics that could be searched by song title, artist name or key phrase. According to Pascal de Vries, the site's founder, it received over a million hits a day from 100,000 users. But Swiss police raided de Vries' home and office, and the offices of his Zurich-based Internet service provider (ISP), Cyberlink, confiscating servers and system passwords. The police were acting on complaints from the Harry Fox Agency - the licensing arm of the US National Music Publishers' Association. The agency represents over 19,000 US music publishers and has recently been pursuing an active campaign against copyright violations. De Vries claims the lyrics are posted on the site from users' own personal transcriptions of songs, not copies of official music, and therefore don't break copyright laws. The site, http://www.lyrics.ch now only shows a message saying it has temporarily shut down. Harry Fox has also brought charges against Cyberlink. Peter Keel, system administrator at the ISP, told Silicon.com his company would be fighting the action. "We provide a service," he said, "we are not responsible for its contents." According to Keel this is a groundbreaking case in Switzerland as there have been no similar lawsuits before. The only precedent, he said, was last year's successful prosecution of Compuserve's German boss. Keel added that he thought the prosecution was a waste of time. "We think it's perfectly OK to run the site. It would have been much more profitable for the music publishers to link to the site - it could have been a big deal for them. An online CD company linked to the site with a banner ad and made around $200,000 last year from its users." The Harry Fox Agency was unable to comment at the time of publishing.