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Comment by crazypyro | Hacker News Reader

So Genius gets people to transcribe the lyrics mostly for free and then sells them to other companies for a lot of money.

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...

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Scraping is one thing, redistributing and republishing is another. In a world where scraping is legally protected, displaying Genius lyrics in a Google infobox could still be illegal without a prior agreement on the basis of copyright. There's an argument for "curation of facts", etc...

Seems all moot since it's not their intellectual property in the first place... as in the artist would own the lyrics?

It looks more like a ToS claim; they aren't claiming to own the lyrics. They aren't objecting to Google scraping their site for the index -- they object to Google/LyricFind scraping the lyrics, removing hidden watermarks to prove provenance, and displaying the lyrics in whole on SERPs, without attribution.

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.

If the watermarks are just text oddities, wouldn't it make sense that they were removed during some sanitization process?

They weren't removed at first - that's how Genius confirmed the lyrics were being lifted. They were only removed after the WSJ article.

Then Genius embedded a second watermarking scheme, and -- drumroll! -- Google's results only removed one of the two sets (the ones they knew about).

Ok - but what's the issue with that?

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 issue is intent, did they remove the watermark as a matter of input sanitization, or did they remove it to conceal their behavior. Genius claims it was the latter.

I mean, from my reading of the complaint, the waterproofing method was rather crude. They just simply changed either the apostrophe character or the space character to different characters that are visually the same.

Any system that wasn't actively trying to clean up "trouble" characters would leave it alone.

Genius actually licenses the lyrics from the music publishers.

The first line of your comment is accusing them of something that they don't do.

And didn't LyricFind claim that the lyrics they licensed were scraped from Genius by the publisher?

I didn't accuse them of anything. I was re-stating what they themselves wrote in their complaint.

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.

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