In the near-constant battle over music piracy, digital rights management, and the push to move the music industry as a whole online, people forget what was one of the original battles over intellectual property, music and the Internet; song lyrics.  While there are a great many sites on the net which boast huge libraries of songs, none of them are officially licensed to republish those lyrics.  In the early days of the Internet, when a MIDI file was considered the cutting edge of online distributed music, record companies were having fits over people reposting their lyrics online.  But everyone seems to have forgotten that in light of the much more serious problem of wholesale piracy of music.

This week, Yahoo! Music launched the first officially licensed lyrics library on the Internet.  The library clocks in at around 400,000 songs and required deals to be struck with around 100 different music labels.  The lyrics were licensed through Gracenote, keepers of CDDB, who have spent more than two years building the list of lyrics.

The new feature has been integrated into the Yahoo! Music service quite thoroughly, though the most obvious place to hook into it is via the new Lyrics Search.

If you're a music buff and are looking for a good source for lyrics, check Yahoo out.