Genius discovered Google was scraping their lyrics
wsj.com
wsj.com
> When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words “Red Handed.”
Clever. Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street.
Can Google really be so stupid/careless to just scrape Genius directly? Their explanation that they source these lyrics from someone, which in turn apparently scrapes Genius seems more plausible to me.
https://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-a...
Why risk showing stolen content when you are already paying for them?
I understand that Genius focuses on Google though. That makes the story a lot more interesting for publications like WSJ that have a bit of a anti-Google campaign going on.
In the source code, in comments I'd put in a varying number of spaces to spell out a copyright phrase; that way, if some comments were removed, it would mostly still be present. It was later used to defend a case of stolen code from what I recall, though I had moved on from that company by then.
It wasn't as sophisticated as this, though; IIRC, mine was just a number of spaces to indicated basic symbols to spell out the phrase and nothing more. At the time, I was 19 years old, and hadn't been doing software dev for very long - young and naive, though that had its advantages back then.
I might be wrong, but IIRC, CR used to be a fan-sub type of site; I don't recall if they hosted stuff, or just linked to it. When I first found them, though, that's how they seemed to be. But since then, I think they license all of their content now or something like that. I may be totally wrong here, keep that in mind...
The copyright situation is not complicated; lyric copyright resides with the songwriter, and is usually sublicensed exclusively to the publisher. Like Napsterisation, these were forced open by hugely widespread infringement, and eventually a stalemate has been reached between publishers and the internet.
Like youtube, this will result in lots of weird anomalies where ownership is disputed and the publishers claim all sorts of things they're not technically entitled to.
Like a lot of other things, the publisher may never have made a clean official copy of the lyrics available, so the actual compilation is done by third parties - but that doesn't grant them a formal copyright in that work. (Unless the weird sui generis right of databases comes into play)
It does, at the least, suggest Google is paying someone who less than ethically sources their data though.
Copyrights, patents, and trademarks have clear limits. An overly expansive theory of copyright would be stifling to innovation and free expression.
It was sourced from someone who was liberal about taking legal risks, but I have a hard time seeing what ethical rights were broken. Indeed, the opposite theory is that if we don't exercise out rights, they go away and Google's source is risking litigation to preserve our rights.
The rightsholder here are the artists and their proxies (publishers and agents), not Genius. I wouldn't feel bad of they asked for a takedown or royalties.
However, to be copyrightable as a derivative, work must contain sufficient new expression to satisfy copyright law's requirement of originality. So you can't copyright a photocopy of a book, for example.
Presumably Genius thinks their lyrics are analogous to the photograph, rather than the photocopy; they may not own the lyrics, but they own this particular transcription of the lyrics.
azlyrics is SO MUCH better. I'd rather see them at the top instead of Genius.