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Comment by ehmorris | Hacker News Reader

This lawsuit isn't about copyright. It's about violating Genius' TOS and anticompetitive behavior.

Google never signed a contract with Genius? How would violating a terms of use they were never subject to be illegal?

Would it be ok to scrape google's results and distribute them, while saying you don't accept their TOS? It's a bit like not paying taxes and saying you didn't sign up for that. Who knows, maybe that's the way forward

> Would it be ok to scrape google's results and distribute them, while saying you don't accept their TOS? It's a bit like not paying taxes and saying you didn't sign up for that.

When Google has the ability to levy taxes, things will be very different all over.

You mean like Startpage.com does?

I am not a lawyer. But I think this was settled with the LinkedIn lawsuit. Yes, it's perfectly fine to scrape public facing information.

Yes, it's been well established that accessing a site is not the same as accepting it's TOS. And That's why Google and any competent site know it's their responsibility to detect scraping and suspicious behavior and block it themselves.

That's an amusing example.

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.

The lawsuit is about Genius having failed to live up to the valuation it raised money at and the expectations for future potential. They've contracted back to being an annotated lyric site and there is nowhere near enough business there to prop up a multi hundred million dollar valuation (much less higher). The conquer the world through annotations plan didn't pan out, at all.

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.

If you ever need to sue somebody for stealing your work, I hope the judge doesn't have the same attitude as you're having right now.

Are you implying that Genius wrote all those songs?

They didn't write the songs, they transcribed the lyrics though.

Source? They likely licensed the lyrics from someone else, which is very different from being "your work"

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