Genius sues Google and LyricFind over allegedly stolen song lyrics
theverge.com
theverge.com
Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but my understanding is this:
1) Genius does not hold a copyright on any of these lyrics
2) Genius licenses these lyrics, and that license is not an exclusive one.
3) Google does not hold a copyright on these lyrics
4) Google licenses these lyrics, and that license is not an exclusive one.
5) "Watermarking" lyrics is not enough to get a derivative work copyright
As both parties have non-exclusive licenses and neither own the copyright, I really don't see how Genius has any chance of winning this case. As best as I can tell, it would be perfectly legal for Google to purposefully and specifically copy the lyrics from Genius.
Edit: Reading through the filing, they seem to basically be suing them for violating their website's TOS and some 'unfair practices' laws local to California and New York. I am unsure of how legally binding TOS are for websites in general, and whether or not being able to view lyrics without ever viewing the TOS effects things, etc.
It's worse. They started out by stealing and scraping these lyrics from other websites.
When Google has the ability to levy taxes, things will be very different all over.
You are aware that Google scrapes almost every page on the internet, without having any agreement with most of them, right?
Yes, you can add noindex and robots.txt to tell them you'd like to opt-out, but:
a) That only works so well, and b) they're default is to use your page without your permission.
They're lucky if they're worth 1/10th their peak valuation currently. So now they're going to stretch in any direction they can for a couple bucks before the lights go out or they're force-sold by the VCs to whatever company will buy it for spare change. Maybe they're hoping Google will open up their pockets and take care of that problem.
Either way, this is the last gasp of a failed (entirely worthy) experiment at getting the masses to annotate everything.
You simply get permission to use the lyrics.
Genius volunteers listen to music and write down their interpretation (punctuation, spelling, spacing etc.)
Genius has a TOS to prevent republication of their content.
Genius started the lawsuit because they claim Google violates this TOS by duplicating Genius's unique transcriptions.
Google specifically claims they are NOT scraping Genius, but Genius claims they have proven that they do with watermarks.
Genius is taking them to court.
Yep
>You simply get permission to use the lyrics.
Also yep.
>Genius volunteers listen to music and write down their interpretation (punctuation, spelling, spacing etc.)
This does not give the volunteers or Genius ownership of the transcribed lyrics.
>Genius has a TOS to prevent republication of their content.
The recent LinkedIn lawsuit seems to set precedent that you cannot enforce a TOS on publicly accessible content like this.
>Genius started the lawsuit because they claim Google violates this TOS by duplicating Genius's unique transcriptions.
Sure. Doesn't mean they have any chance of winning it.
>Google specifically claims they are NOT scraping Genius, but Genius claims they have proven that they do with watermarks.
My understanding is Google is claiming they get their lyrics from a 3rd party. If that's the case, they can certainly say that they aren't scraping Genius themselves.
This is different from the story that came out this past summer, about Genius watermarking lyrics.
1. There’s a new watermark. After the first watermark got exposed, Google said they’d investigate, but Genius has caught them again.
2. Genius has filed an actual lawsuit.
Disclosure: I used to work at Genius
Also, a direct link to the legal complaint, which is a surprisingly fun read: https://iapps.courts.state.ny.us/nyscef/ViewDocument?docInde...
> This watermark (“Watermark #1”) involved replacing the apostrophes in a selection of newly released songs with a distinctive pattern of curly (’) and straight apostrophes (').6 Genius set the 2nd, 5th, 13th, 14th, 16th and 20th apostrophes of each watermarked song as curly apostrophes, and all the other apostrophes straight. If the straight apostrophes are interpreted as dots and the curly apostrophes are interpreted as dashes, the pattern spells out “REDHANDED” in Morse code, as shown below. Genius designed Watermark #1 to be woven into the text of the lyrics of the watermarked songs so that, if the apostrophe pattern were to be found outside of Genius’s website, there would be no explanation other than that the lyrics were copied from Genius’s website, e.g., by using the copy/paste functionality or a computer program.
It reminds me of "trap streets" mapmakers add to their maps to "trap" potential copyright violators: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
Google found someone to provide lyrics and that company allegedly scraps Genius for cheaper than Genius charges for direct access.
So this is basically a continuation of the on-going question of whether scraping is legal? That's my basic understanding from reading the complaint. I'm also not sure why Google is at fault, except for a bunch of ranting about the Information Box stealing their business.
Guess there's also the attempt to try to enforce Genius' ToS...
The removal of watermarks, after repeated contacts and the WSJ article, indicate that Google/LyricFind acted in bad faith.
The best part is they encoded the watermark so that Watermark #1 spelled out REDHANDED and Watermark #2 spelled out GENIUS, using a pretty clever method that survived multiple data transfers/transformations.
Any system that wasn't actively trying to clean up "trouble" characters would leave it alone.
Then Genius embedded a second watermarking scheme, and -- drumroll! -- Google's results only removed one of the two sets (the ones they knew about).
I don't think anyone is debating at this whether or not Google was in fact copying the genius lyrics, just whether or not that was in fact breach of contract or otherwise a violation of the law.
Changing fake apostrophes to real apostrophes after they found out their (in their mind legally acquired) data had them is just plain sensible, fake apostrophes break functionality like search for users (both ctrl-f and possibly more sophisticated search engines like google.com). They add edge cases to any software that wants to use them for text to speech or whatever. And so on. Literally the only use case fake apostrophes don't impact by at least adding an edge case is humans reading song lyrics that they have already found.
The first line of your comment is accusing them of something that they don't do.
Yes, Genius licenses the lyrics, but they often aren't provided the lyrics when they purchase a license. This is where the community comes in... FWIW, Google and the other target of the complaint have the same license from these music publishers.
This is all spelled out clearly in Genius' complaint.
After that first watermark, either Google, Lyricfind or both took steps to 'un-watermark' the lyrics (once they knew what to look for), but kept doing it unabated, as Genius showed when they used another watermark that they didn't reveal (pretty sneaky, with Unicode space characters in certain locations only).
(I’m aware this lawsuit isn’t about copyright, I’m just curious)
Genius doesn’t have a copyright claim because it doesn’t own the lyrics. Both Genius and Google hold licenses from music publishers to print song lyrics, which makes the lawsuit trickier, focusing more on how Google and its partners got the lyrics to begin with.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20993621/genius-google-la...
I offer that to correct a mistake, knowing it doesn't invalidate your point. Reading the complaint, it sounds like it's a ToS violation. The interesting thing is that Google -> Genius have some business agreements (Genius is an adsense customer, at the least).
To my Not A Lawyer brain, that moves it out of the "scraping public documents is fine" and into a more complicated relationship. The outcome of this lawsuit will be interesting!
Just having a license doesn't necessarily give you the actual lyrics though. They still have to create or buy them from somebody.
In the past I think LyricFind said that when they licensed lyrics, some were provided by the publisher and it was the publisher that scraped them from Genius. I may be mis-remembering that, but there was something along those lines.
I think this is an issue of Genius alleging that LyricFind scraped their website with is a ToS violation.
But other sites have a different transliteration.
I thought it was just them exposing the content from genius, the same way it works for weather.
Genius was caught many years doing blackhat SEO that would have gotten smaller sites permanently banned, but thanks to google's kindness was forgiven.
The business isn’t kind - it’s practical. This should read “thanks to a positive transaction value Genius was forgiven”
Clearly Google seems to agree that Genius has the best results based on the efforts they've taken to steal and even hide the fact that they're stealing from Genius.
Just to be clear, Genius may be small compared to Google, but they are the de facto source of lyrics for music. Can you imagine if users suddenly no longer found Google useful for figuring out lyrics? It would genuinely cost them users switching to Bing, DuckDuckGo, etcetera.
De-platforming a customer can feasibly demonstrate having a monopoly in a given business space.
Demonstrating you have a monopoly could lead to advanced regulation.
Sounds like fuel for the case against Google...Google would normally ban sites for x but didn't ban Genius for doing x, but why? Because Google was knowingly and willfully scraping/commercializing their content.
https://www.theverge.com/2019/9/10/20859399/linkedin-hiq-dat...
Genius makes the lyrics publicly available on the web and there was just a good outcome on web scraping public data. I can't imagine Genius has a case here but IANAL.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
Facts are not copyrightable. And a collection of facts are not copyrightable. There has to be some spark of creativity or originality even small.
Wonder what Genius is claiming makes their lyrics "original" compared to what they get from the source...
If so, why?
Given that the lyrics aren't owned by Genius, and that Google has a license to them, there's no reasonable claim of copyright violation.
There have been several cases lately that seem to suggest there's no problem with using public data either.
If you don't like it, don't make the data public. Require a login, and then you might have a case.
Come up with the same map as me based on research and first principles, you’re safe.
Plagiarize my effort and in the process capture the fake/non existent streets I -added- to the map to show that you were plagiarizing my work? Then absolutely I have a case against you.
Come up with the same lyrics for a song as I do based on listening to it? Fine.
Cutting and pasting my content, including unnecessary embedded Unicode spaces used to watermark my content, my transcription (see my other comment on this), absolutely problematic and actionable.
A transcription can be a creative work, so it can be protected by copyright. A transcription is copying and transforming an original work in a particular (symbolic). The original work that the transcription is based on is also protected by copyright, so to make the copy that embodies the transcription, you need permission from the original rights holder. Splicing the transcription onto an illegal copy of an original performance is also copyright infringement, but resynthesis based on the transcription is not. A transcription also might not be entitled to copyright protection, if it is the product of a computer program, since feeding a sound file into a program is not a creative activity. (The program that generated the transcription is, of course, protected by copyright).
Ergo, there absolutely can be claims that you need to license my content, consisting of original synthesized copyrighted lyrics.
I highly doubt Google or LyricsFind's contracts with the Artists or Labels says "We won't give you the lyrics, but if you find someone else has put them down on 'paper', go ahead and just slurp that up, regardless of their efforts, and make some money off of that for yourself, sucks to be them".
That's pretty much what the contracts are; the rightsholders don't actually have the lyrics in a machine readable form; or if they do, they're from liner notes which often don't actually match the songs as performed on the media that came with the notes, so pretty worthless.
It seems that the only thing giving Genius any footing is their Terms of Service, which ToS tend to be unenforceable. Also consider the case involving LinkedIn which set precedence in being able to scrape public information.
Then again, IANAL so they may have more footing than I realize and/or they may do some transcription themselves, but it is largely their users.
Users who have consented to supply said efforts to Genius. Not to Google. Or LyricFind.
It also brings up a good point on whether Genius should have exclusive rights to something in which they gained that exclusivity from uninformed "consent" of their users' efforts. If transcribed lyrics are copyrightable, why should Genius hold that right and not the users' when Genius are claiming that right by hiding their Terms of Use as a tiny link made to seem like it's part of the website's copyright/trademark notice[0]. I'm inclined to believe that Genius are purposefully being deceitful in how they link to their Terms of Use to avoid flack.
Can I scrape your website to get that content I am legally allowed to get (because I have a paid license)?
And then not doing that. And instead concealing and fixing the watermark that allowed the -detection- of the issue.
You can’t do that, and make the statements above and then credibly try to argue “nothing to see here, you have no rights”.
When Genius points out that - after being told what their apostrophe watermark scheme was - LyricFind / Google started stripping that watermark while still copying things wholesale, Mike says:
> Damned if you do, damned if you don't
Which is obstinate to say the least. Mike tries to paint the picture that it's entirely okay, because they removed the mechanism to detect copying, while still copying. Poor LyricFind.
Poor LyricFind, who, while covering their tracks, -weren't- deleting the _second_ watermark, that Genius didn't tell them about, thus showing that this was an entirely wilful, knowing act.
All of his arguments complain/whine about "how dare they, they have no copyright, of course, because they did nothing!", wilfully ignoring that Genius, and any other sites who _actively license_ the ability to reproduce lyrics these days have to generate their own lyrics from first principles - the days of liner notes/lyrics are largely gone.
Mike's arguments for the most part consisted of calling Genius "idiots" for failing his tests as to what the law is, often wrong, or willfully ostrich-like to anything that might derail his diatribe.
https://www.vox.com/2014/5/26/11627246/rap-genius-co-founder...
Seems like Google has a license to listen to the audio, produce the text lyrics and then use these lyrics.
Since Google is indirectly stealing these lyrics, their license is not valid.
It does not match the interpretation of anyone else out there that I am aware of - it is not even an argument that Genius is making in their lawsuit.
Certainly Genius is reading these threads and get new ideas.
Genius has no ownership over the lyrics - they are not their intellectual property. When you get a license to mineral rights, whatever you extract is your property and you have ownership of it. That isn't the case here, and as such, it's a nonsensical analogy.