His remarks about remotely destroying computers that download copyrighted material is just grampa blather. The computers are stealing music! The cars are frightening the horses! The Kaiser took my dog! It would be amusing if these people didn’t have the power to pass thick stupid laws crafted by aides, lobbyists and other gnomes hauling up heavy buckets from the deep sooty mines of legalese. Of course the people who vote them up or down don’t actually read them; they get the gist from the title.

“What’s this Copyright Enhancement Act of 2003 all about, young underpaid aide?”

“It’s about enhancing copyright, sir.”

“Very good then.”

The idea that the government, or recording industries, could remotely destroy your computer isn’t out of the realm of possibility - I suppose they could send a stealthy bug that would scramble the hard drive. I don’t think Sen. Hatch envisioned an electrical spike that would shower the user with broken glass from the monitor.

I know, I know - he was just talking off the top of his head. But if someone is talking about, oh, women’s pay relative to men, and they say off the top of their head “can’t the girls just stay home and put up preserves?” - well, it shows what they really think. Off the top of one’s head means when I reach for an idea, this one is the closest. For a reason.

“People can get it for free on the Internet, and it’s hurting the songwriters,” said Lauren Keiser, who is president of the Music Publishers’ Association and chief executive of Carl Fischer, a music publisher in New York.

So far, the Music Publishers’ Association and the National Music Publishers’ Association have shut down several Web sites, or have pressured them to remove all of their tabs, but users have quickly migrated to other sites. According to comScore Media Metrix, an Internet statistics service, Ultimate-Guitar.com had 1.4 million visitors in July, twice the number from a year earlier.

The publishers, who share royalties with composers each time customers buy sheet music or books of guitar tablature, maintain that tablature postings, even inaccurate ones, are protected by copyright laws because the postings represent “derivative works” related to the original compositions, to use the industry jargon.

The publishers told the sites that if they did not remove the tablatures, they could face legal action or their Internet service providers would be pressured to shut down their sites. All of the sites have taken down their tabs voluntarily, but grudgingly.

The tablature sites argue that they are merely conduits for an online discussion about guitar techniques, and that their services help the industry.

“The publishers can’t dispute the fact that the popularity of playing guitar has exploded because of sites like mine,” said Robert Balch, the publisher of Guitar Tab Universe (guitartabs.cc), in Los Angeles. “And any person that buys a guitar book during their lifetime, that money goes to the publishers.”

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Google also dabbles in tablature through its Google Groups discussion board service, in which guitar players trade tabs they have figured out by listening to the songs, or by copying tabs found elsewhere. A Google spokesman, Steve Langdon, said Google would take down music tablature from its Groups service if publishers claimed the materials violated copyright agreements and if Google determined that infringement was likely. Under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, Web hosts may review, case by case, a publisher’s claims regarding instances of copyright infringement.

To hear music publishers tell it, though, the tablature sites are getting away with mass theft. Mr. Keiser, of the Music Publishers’ Association, said that before these sites started operating in the early ‘90s, the most popular printed tablatures typically sold 25,000 copies in a year. Now the most popular sell 5,000 copies at most.

But Mike Happoldt, who was a member of the ’90’s band Sublime and whose music is sold in sheet music books, said he sympathized with the tablature sites.

“I think this is greed on the publishers’ parts,” said Mr. Happoldt, who played guitar on Sublime’s hit “What I Got.”

“I guess in a way I might be losing money from these sites, but as a musician I look at it more as a service,” said Mr. Happoldt, who now owns an independent record company, Skunk Records. “And really, those books just don’t sell that much for most people.”

Assuming a tablature site musters the legal resources to challenge the publishers in court, some legal scholars say they believe publishers may have difficulty arguing their complaints successfully. Jonathan Zittrain, the professor of Internet governance and regulation at Oxford University, said “it isn’t at all clear” that the publishers’ claim would succeed because no court doctrine has been written on guitar tablature.

Mr. Zittrain said the tablature sites could well have a free speech defense. But because the Supreme Court, in a 2003 case involving the extension of copyright terms, declined to determine when overenforcement or interpretation of copyright might raise a free speech problem, the success of that argument was questionable. “It’s possible, though, that this is one reason why guitar tabs generated by people would be found to fit fair use,” Mr. Zittrain said, “or would be found not to be a derivative work to begin with.”