Hmmm... Interesting situation regarding copyrights and a lyric database; the addition of the timing parameters could qualify the lyrics as a new work of art in their own right - and the fact that it would not be used as any kind of competition to anything that the music company publishes would also reinforce that.

As a non-perfect analogy, consider a phone book. You're not allowed to go through the Yellow Pages and copy it number for number, page for page, and then sell the resulting 'Green' Pages as your own creation. But you're perfectly entitled to recreate the works from scratch.

Another (perhaps better) analogy would be CDDB. Created from scratch, it contains a superset of the track listing that appears on the album cover. This would not be far different.

Yet another way to look at it - if you've legally bought that album, or anything containing the lyrics, you'd have the right to make a backup copy of the lyrics and to use any method you saw fit to backup and display those lyrics. And current copyright law gives you leeway to share that with friends - and I certainly count myself amongst friends here.

That all being said, you would definitely want to limit access and keep it hushed. If it got to a C&D letter stage, you'd have to comply - it'd just be too much hassle (and money) to try and defend a court case, and we know that the RIAA have deep pockets when it comes to lawyers.

Another reason to keep it hushed and protected - if it ever got well populated, then eventually through a friend of a friend of a brother of a wife of someone on this board (or something like that...), it's existence would probably end up being posted on a slow news day at Slashdot.