Lyrics Site Genius.com Accuses Google of Lifting Its Content
wsj.com
wsj.com
> In a statement, Google said the lyrics on its site, which pop up in little search-result squares called “information panels,” are licensed from partners, not created by Google... In 2016, Google partnered with LyricFind Inc., a Canadian company that secures deals with music publishers allowing companies such as Google to publish lyrics online.
So Google is properly licensing lyrics from song publishers and uses a third party to provide the lyrics, and somehow that third party wound up with more than a "hundred" -- not a million but a hundred -- that were copy-pasted from Genius at some point.
Except for the apostrophes thing being clever, this sounds like a complete non-issue? That Genius's issue is not with Google but the company they source from... AND that they'd have to prove a wholesale systematic copying (closer to millions of songs) as opposed to it being e.g. some rando employee who got lazy and took a shortcut one week?
I don't think that company even should know how their content will be used. For example if they just offer web-scraping service and provide raw data? For example for statistical analizes. And then Google publish this data as is on SERP and make money on adv. How is responsible in this case?
To be fair, they can probably only confirm incorrect lyrics. Correct ones would look the exact same. Presumably, the vast majority are correct
Unlikely. Official lyrics (printed in CD inserts, for example) often have punctuation mistakes, or they have no punctuation at all.
Unofficial lyrics can have the same words while still differing in punctuation, line breaks, capitalization, or spelling (since most languages have multiple ways to spell the same word -- color/colour, for example).
All the tiny variations could easily create a distinct fingerprint for each source of lyrics.
See: Van Halen, R.E.M., and a million other bands.
They should be able to accurately confirm whether hundreds of thousands of songs were taken from Genius, without any difficulty.
The best example is that Google claim that the copyright to the Star Spangled Banner, the National Anthem of the U.S.A., is owned by "Concord Music Publishing LLC". It's beyond parody.
Song-writers don't seem to have much of a say in their lyrics showing up on these sites, and are often not credited at all. This has been going on a long long time and getting it right doesn't seem to be a priority.
They're saying the lyrics come from the arrangement used for Super Bowl XXV, and that arrangement is copyright Concord Music Publishing. It would be better if they used the lyrics from the official public domain national anthem, but this isn't that weird.
It is obvious in this case that the information is wrong, but what of the many songs that Google misleads people into thinking are likewise locked up in rights? It's simply ridiculous on the face of it.
Edit: Getting into the weeds a bit here, but I don't think performances themselves can be copyrighted (in the US, that is). Recordings can be copyrighted, as can musical compositions, lyrics, and subsequent arrangements. It is my understanding that, in order for something to be eligible for copyright, it must be fixed in a "tangible medium of expression."
It's also worth mentioning that music publishing companies generally control compositions, not recordings. But even supposing Concord Music Publishing has copyright on the arrangement used on that particular occasion, that does not imply they have copyright on the lyrics.
While other aspects of the Super Bowl arrangement and performance are under copyright, the lyrics aren't.
The value add of Genius isnt so much in the lyrics but in the explanation and context given grom Genius. I have even seen actual artists confirm interpretations and explain some things as well I think Hittman from Dr. Dre's 2001 album was one such artist if I remember correctly.
I do see what you are saying on the other hand but I dont think that lyrics written down from a song are some random websites copyright / property.
"Ownership" such as it is for intellectual property is still with the copyright holder(s), which is why it makes sense that you don't have the same rights you would if it were truly "your" song.
As a listener, you either own a physical product that happens to have been made with those licenses, or you're listening to a performance, if you're streaming. Neither of these things give you further rights with the song or recording.
This stuff is pretty wacky, and I may have some of those details wrong. I took a class in music industry law a decade ago
Why? It's pretty much a poem.
The ones printed in the booklet that came with the CD or encoded in the mp3 file?
If Google is simply scraping that content from them without permission then that has been litigated many times in court and almost always comes out badly for the "scraper".
But if Google is not sending traffic to Genius and using Genius as the source for some of it's lyrics, that's shady as hell. That's anti-trust.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/business/media/rap-genius...
I wonder how much they have to pay?
I would like to know what Google team is in charge of using search trends to identify services to offer.
Yes, making a node that connects to another service seems like a goal.
~20 years ago some people were wondering what does Google gain from giving free service. The point is Google is trying to be the one stop shop for the whole internet no matter what you need.
Unfortunately I don't see anything changing for Google especially in the US where lobbying is such a cheap way to turn all legislation to their advantage.
If you only search for "speed test", you get Google's panel followed by Ookla's. I see nothing wrong with this, they are giving users what they want.
Amazon discovers the best selling third-party products on it's site, and then makes it's own version of them too. Everybody is doing it.
Pretty soon, 5 companies will be serving up 99.9% of the content on the Internet. Nothing wrong with that.
Nothing anyone here in startup land needs to worry about.
Right?
Oligopoly is nearly as bad as Monopoly.
Τechnically once the big4 (plus a couple more) own the 99% of the traffic then we will have monopolies on each areas. Google on Search, Amazon on Shopping, Facebook on Socials, Apple on Phones.
And on the outer circle a parasitic ad/tracking ecosystem working with these 4 monopolies. I am not a pescimist, but as nightmare scenarios go, I take it that this is a plausible one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu
> The web browser choice screen, also known as the web browser ballot box, was a screen displayed in Internet Explorer that offered ten to twelve browsers in a random order.
Note the "in a random order".
Small clarification: Google doesn't own the speed test. It owns the speed test client, but it performs the test against a third-party NDT server (an open-source server for bandwidth measurement)[1]. The servers are operated and maintained by M-Lab[2], a third-party consortium of companies of which Google is a member. The servers are all in commercial data centers and are completely separate from any Google service, so the speed test doesn't measure your bandwidth to Google.
Saves a click and the ordeal of loading a gazillion quasi-malicious ads posing as information. Much better in my book.
Monopoly is already a thing. A big part of the world is already controlled by just a handful of mega corporations and possibly just a few hundred ultra wealthy people. The internet is simply mirroring the real world :(
So this is exactly what we’re getting. Megacorps chewing up everything to be as big as they can.
As I see it, almost by definition, startups create their moment in the sun by finding blind-spots in the market. Fair play to the big companies who rise to the occasion and address these user needs once they've been pointed out.
Not that I'm a huge Google fan, but without search services like Google, users wouldn't know where content was.
You're a very odd bird indeed if you think the vast majority of people want severely-biased search results, and for Google to unfairly leverage their search position to kill competition.
In the case of the embedded speed test that pops up on Google vs. Oookla, it's not as simple as it might seem.
Google owns the JS widget that performs the test, but the backend server is owned and maintained by M-Lab, a third-party consortium (of which Google is a member).
It's a pretty neat project. The code is all open-source and the raw data of the speed tests is all publicly available and licensed under Creative Commons No Rights Reserved Zero Waiver:
* https://www.measurementlab.net
Would you be satisfied if AOL bought out the internet, because that's what users wanted in the 1990s, and Google never had a chance to exist?
Also, a company could better serve cable customers by recording all their content and stream it to customers charging a low monthly fee.
Neither of these are much different from Google's practices in regards to their info panels.
Unlike your second example, this example doesn't make any sense to me. The amount of effort and infrastructure required to do a decent job at this would surely make it at least as expensive as the way Google does it. How could this be cost-effective without ads? I imagine that the amount of people who'd be willing to pay for the same search results that they could get from Google is in the low single digits.
I use a search engine to find information not to find a website that serves that.
(Fyi i don't use good, I'm a ddg user)
Edit: thumbs and smartphone :-)
Otherwise I think You would care if Google steals all your hard work.
Look I get it and I agree. I was posting from a users point of view. I'll happily accept the downvotes though :-)
If Google delisting your site destroys your business, there’s an argument to be made that they also created your business in the first place.
From the article in this post:
"When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words 'Red Handed.'"
I'm aware of the history of Genius (formerly Rap Genius) so I found the translation of the code to be entertaining and mildly ironic.
https://genius.com/Genius-founders-rap-genius-is-back-on-goo...
Taking someone else's list of ingredients and steps and putting them in your own words is legal. Taking the recipe verbatim isn't.
Transcribing the lyrics yourself is kinda like writing the list of ingredients - it's a statement of fact. "The lyrics of this song are X."
Copying that effort from someone else, alternating apostrophes and all, is a bit different. In most cases, you can't prove that's what happened, but it's quite clear here.
When the apostrophes spell out "red handed" in Morse code, though...
These lyrics are the intellectual property of the people who actually wrote them.
Do you reckon I can't write those lyrics down and teach them to someone because they "are" someone's intellectual property?
Genius pays royalties for using the lyrics - I don’t see why the fact that they don’t belong to Genius is relevant. If Amazon licenses a TV show that Netflix also licensed, it doesn’t give them the right to copy Netflix’s UI, descriptions, transcoded/edited video streams, etc.
Nobody is accusing Google of copying the annotations, just the lyrics.
Genius didn’t write them, and they didn’t even transcribe them as you point out.
I’m no Google fan in the context of ripping off competitors but Genius has a pretty shady history as well and it’s pretty hard to have sympathy for either of them.
One of the rights conferred by copyright is the right to not publish.
Maybe they do that now, but users used to at least to be able to add lyrics for any artist and song they wanted. There wasn't a license waiting period or anything before they went up.
I am extremely skeptical of this claim.
I'm guess that LyricFind got lawyers from all the major labels to sign licenses, but no one ever actually bothered to get the lyrics for them. Management probably told their tech people to just get them from wherever.
Just because the lyrics may be entered by users has no bearing on the fact that the lyrics are copyrighted works and that Genius.com doesn't own or have any rights to them. Just like doing a cover of another band's song doesn't mean you now own the song, reproducing and distributing a song's lyrics doesn't mean you now own the lyrics.
1) Google will apologize and remove genius.com from results 2) Traffic at genius will plummet 3) Genius will beg for mercy, and give Google full rights to all material
2. If y > x, where x = ((purchase price of company from #1) / 3) and y = (amount of payout) or y = (clicks * 1000) in #1
3. Clone MVP, remove company from adsense_payouts and search_results
"You can opt out of featured snippets by preventing snippets on your page using the <meta name="googlebot" content="nosnippet"> tag on your page. This will remove all snippets on your page, including those in regular search results."
The WSJ also comments that rap genius does not have rights here - full disclosure I am an investor in Hipgnosis (SONG) - I trust Rap genius are paying them correctly.
> In a statement, Google said the lyrics on its site, which pop up in little search-result squares called “information panels,” are licensed from partners, not created by Google.
> In 2016, Google partnered with LyricFind Inc., a Canadian company that secures deals with music publishers allowing companies such as Google to publish lyrics online.
The meta tag would have no effect. One of Google's vendors is stealing from Genius, not Google directly.
And have never heard of google licencing position 0 snippets before. And in the UK I see the actual song writers and publishers credited which is sort of what I would expect
Citing a former Google lawyer, not exactly the most unbiased source.