Court dismisses Genius lawsuit over lyrics-scraping by Google
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
Genius knows this, which is why they didn't file a copyright suit. Instead, they claimed other things like unfair competition and breach of contract. However, Title 17 Section 301 of the US Code says that "all legal or equitable rights that are equivalent to any of the exclusive rights within the general scope of copyright [...] are governed exclusively by this title". To avoid this, Genius needed to prove that their claims weren't "equivalent" – ie weren't just copyright claims dressed up as something else. They failed to do this, and so their case was thrown out.
I guess at some point it’d end up looking like a ReCaptcha and there’s enough of those already ...
If fake data is hidden amongst real data, wouldn't there also be the argument that the copier was unaware that they were copying a creative work rather than pure facts?
A damaged Berserker captures an atlas showing an occupied system nearby, and heads there with its last reserves of power to destroy the system.
The human who didn't stop the Berserker is charged with a crime against sentience, but is acquitted when he reveals the secret: The occupied system was a fake, in the tradition of cartographers going back to the Middle Ages on Sol.
Lyrics are not just found in the wild (like a mountain or a street is). Someone thought of them, wrote them down, so it was their creation. It is like listening to me reciting a poem, write it down, and sell the book.
You might be thinking of sui generis database rights, which DOES cover collections of facts. The EU, Russia, and Brazil recognize this right, but the US doesn't: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right#United_States
See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/images/6/6f/Protection_of_C...
For example, horse drawn carriages have the right of way even over pedestrians, because you’re pulling weight, or more accurately, a beast of burden is pulling the weight. It’s a living thing too, and it can’t stop on a dime when it’s got a load. It makes sense when you know the context and framing for why the law is so written today.
I’m sure there are similar examples in others contexts. Court cases and judges look at the law like we do whitepapers. Some docs are better than others, and there are some devs, and other judges’ toes you’d be hesitant to tread on, especially if you have a habit of doing that kind of thing.
For example, many artists publish playlists on Spotify to build their brand; it could plausibly be copyright infringement for one of them to verbatim copy a playlist I made and publish it as their own, even if I don't hold the copyright to any of the songs on my playlist, and even if one of the songs on the playlist was actually that artists' own song. The act of assembling a playlist is potentially copyrightable expression.
> The Act also provides copyright protection to compilations, but only to the extent that there has been a contribution of originality in assembling that compilation.
Map copyright is based on the idea there are decisions made around what to include and how to display it.
You can't photocopy a map and claim copyright. However, a human can trace the same map and claim copyright.
See City of New York v. GeoData Plus, and the discussion in https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/images/6/6f/Protection_of_C...
In this regard, copying lyrics of some particular song does not violate the rights of Genius - they don't have copyright to that particular song and the compilation-of-facts rights don't apply for that particular single item.
The judge may have done the correct thing, but readers may feel that Congress didn't. This case will doubtless be used in the future to argue for sui generis database rights like the EU has.
(My view is that in principle, some form of sui generis database rights makes sense, but for the things that US copyright law already covers it is currently far, FAR too restrictive and lasts too long, so I would vehemently oppose expansion of existing US copyright law to cover sui generis database rights.
However, if US copyright law were reformed such that it mandated blanket licensing (see [the EFF proposal]), strengthened fair use protections, and shortened copyright duration, then I would totally support similar rights for sui generis databases.)
[EFF proposal for blanket licensing]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/05/plan-pay-artists-encou...
yes this has often happened
> and need to be changed again
the thing is, they often don't get changed.
Law endeavours, or let me say: should endeavour...
To be fair.
And fairness is entirely a human emotional pursuit.
Laws are constantly changing for a reason, "fairness" isn't set in stone nor objective.
Are you American by any chance ? I've seen a lot of American talking like that about "law" as if they were god given, immutable, objective and fair.
Maybe I'm being pedantic, but laws themselves are objective. At least, they are crafted to be an objective description of what is "right" and "wrong". Said another way, laws exist to objectify the morals of the law's author.
I think what you are trying to say is that laws are not self-justifying. Laws draw an objective view of the world, but we can subjectively agree that we don't like that view and then change it.
This could be an issue of articles: Laws are objective; the law is subjective.
To whit, a Law does not always describing discrete actions and consequences.
To say a Law is Objective is not saying anything, because the Law is necessarily interpreted in any frame of reference. A single Law is necessarily subjective and following this, The Law in aggregate is subjective.
At least talk about why you think deontology is better than other forms of norm setting, why the law must be right even though there are many different and contradictory laws in different places, and how you propose to make new rules if not based on a concept of "right" that is independent from the existing rules.
It will never be "fair" because it only very rarely take all of the circumstances into account - as Anatole France put it: "In its majestic equality, the law forbids rich and poor alike to sleep under bridges, beg in the streets and steal loaves of bread."
Neither is it particularly objective - its application, especially in a common-law system, is extremely subjective. (You're bound by whatever the judge in previous cases thought the law was - E.g. in the US "stare decisis" is enshrined pretty much as an immutable rule)
It has never been a framework of "right or wrong", either. It is a framework on how disputes get settled. There is no interest in "right" beyond "the authors of the law at the time thought it was a good idea"
To take a trivial example: Slavery was recognized as morally wrong long before the law actually made it something that was not allowed. The law still allows carceral slavery, even though there is growing consensus that that's morally wrong.
As for "better" systems - there's certainly a large faction of countries making the case a civil law system is better than a common law system. But you don't need a "better system" - the law can only be meaningful if we accept that at all times, it will be flawed, it is not "fair and objective", it needs to be tempered with compassion, and it is our job to improve upon what we have.
MLK
That certainly IS a consistent position one could take. Most people feel that there are certain moral imperatives that exist independent of government-defined laws and that government laws can be fair or unfair. However, the position you take here -- that "fair" means whatever the government says -- is a possible basis for ethics.
But I, and most people, find it to be deficient. It requires that you admit that (for one example) slavery in the USA before 1863 was fair which I (and most people) disagree with. I'm sure you can find other examples if you wish.
Are you sure this is what you want to base your definition of "fair" on?
It’s only the laws which are unfair AND which affect a majority of voters, where you could maybe claim democracy has weighed in on the fairness.
History is littered with laws which are only unfair to minorities, which I think proves my point.
They can be better, but you have to understand them to know how to improve them.
Perhaps you mean: they are full of bugs, fragile, broken, but occasionally they work?
Improving legacy code always means to understand business logic and if possible the motivation behind it. Then you have a replacement built and you can justify why it is better.
Shall I go on?
"laws aren't broken" is the kind of thing someone says when they've never seen "justice" in action, or are walking around with their eyes shut.
"Legacy" code that only "occasionally works" doesn't sound like something worth keeping around. It sounds like something to dump in the trash and never look back.
If you have working legacy code though, even if it occasionally fails because it's full of bugs and fundamental flaws, should be replaced very carefully, and only with in-depth understanding of what is working and what is broken about the existing system.
Based on the broken laws you list, I assume you're talking about America. American laws are indeed very broken, but dumping it in the trash and never looking back would be a one-way ticket to a bloodbath. It is both important very important to fix our very broken laws, and important to do so very carefully and only with an in-depth understanding of what is working and what is broken about the existing system.
If I were to give you as much benefit of the doubt as you give your parent, I'd say that "occasionally laws work" is the kind of thing someone says when they've never seen how much worse it can get.
If you believe any given law is unfair, it is your duty to disobey. This is called civil disobedience.
Not really all true though. Genius started out by stealing lyrics from other sites. In the early days many of the lyrics had the exact same errors as other more establish sites. That may have changed since.
It's much better now, but that's only because of unpaid volunteer editors who do most of the corrections and annotations in their site.
Apparently they license the lyrics now:
> Genius isn’t the copyright holder for these lyrics, it just licenses them itself.
It's not a case of someone copying without permission and then suing another person who copied them. It's a valid licensee suing someone who is copying them.
Imagine if a McDonald's franchisee sued someone running a rogue/unlicensed McDonald's around the corner. Would we have no sympathy for them also?
Legally speaking, it appears the right to sue requires at least some exclusive copyright rights, [1] which Genius surely didn't have (and a McDonald's franchisee also would not have). This is presumably why they didn't bring a copyright suit.
https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=7d4ea127-0fb0...
The fact that Genius collated those works is meaningful work in its own right.
There are examples in law that 'work' can be protected; Just because you don't have the copyright doesn't mean that someone else is just allowed to use your work results.
Apparently in this specific case its not protected.
The way to check this is pretty easy though, get 2 users to bit for bit compare their books to work out if they are identical.
The watermarking is done using characters that look different from each other. Printing the book will not change those characters, and therefore it is still possible to extract the original information. Harder, but not impossible.
For this information to be lost, Evince would have to print the book in a crappy font that uses a single symbol for both. Which is possible, but I think it's not what you were going for.
They won't have people manually reviewing the punctuation to catch infringement, and it's highly probable that Evince printing to PDF will mess the whole internal structure, so it's hard to automate it.
https://gizmodo.com/harpercollins-is-now-using-digital-water...
https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/everything-you-need...
Amusingly, I believe if you use calibre's ebook conversion to replace stylesheets and add toc, it may also actually remove those markers that have no actual content and only exist to provide a unique ID.
Taking a layperson's reading of the lyrics, I didn't find anything off due to quoting issues. If there was any disruption, it was minimal and unnoticed.
If you hope to avoid being caught this way, I'm going to assume you noticed this without the benefit of hindsight and plan to correct all out-of-place Unicode characters automatically. How will you avoid over-correcting?
There's also no reason to believe this is the only fingerprinting Genius has done (they only need to publish the most obvious fail). For example, I can use the same fingerprinting technique but switch between American and British spellings.
This is not a straightforward problem.
The fingerprinting isn't likely applied to every song, to prevent obvious detection. If you went through multiple databases, you might see N prevailing copies of a song's lyrics, and 1 that seemed different. The one that's different has the anomaly.
So "rock 'n' roll" is correct. And "rock ’n’ roll" is correct. But "rock ‘n’ roll" is not correct, since the wrong apostrophe is used. We're not quoting the letter n, we're showing that the letter a was removed.
[1]: https://patents.google.com/patent/US9881516B1/en
(Software patents should be abolished. I just like to point out their absurdity and how it's easy to independently develop a technique (steganography in a search engine result) that someone has already grubbed a "patent" on.)
The patent claim requires the program to "load available PHP server header information"
How these patents even pass the sniff test, I'll never understand.
> while particular embodiments and applications have been illustrated and described, it is to be understood that the disclosed embodiments are not limited to the precise construction and components disclosed herein. _Various modifications, changes and variations, which will be apparent to those skilled in the art, may be made in the arrangement, operation and details of the method and apparatus disclosed herein without departing from the spirit and scope defined in the appended claims._
If I'm reading this correctly, this patent is claiming things that are "apparent" (obvious?) to those "in the know". Computer or not, how did this get granted?
https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hiybbprqag
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/hiybbprqag-how-google-tripped-u...
E.G. When they caught Bing copying them... https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/
And they definitely do it with maps. There is a tiny little village I visit in rural Roscommon each year. Each year a new major retailer appears to have opened in this 500 population village, well according to Google Maps that is. At the moment there is a branch of New Look situated on a farm down a single track country lane.
I recall coming across this in my travels. There was a named "town" at the intersection of two streets - upon passing through there, nothing. Later wondering where the town went I found that it was not ever there and was just present to identify people copying that map.
Timing is critical in Morse code. You can't just write out a bunch of dashes and dots to transcribe it without clearly transcribing the rests between dots and dashes as well. They haven't given us the rests at all, so all the info they end up having is:
dot dash dot dot dash dot dot dot dot dot dot dot dash dash dot dash dot dot dot dash dot dot
And that can be interpreted in any number of different possible ways besides "REDHANDED". E.g. it could also be "AU5EWRFE", or any of thousands of different interpretations (actually probably a lot more than that; this would be a fun programming problem). They should have used a binary encoding; 22 bits (all they have given us) is not enough information to uniquely encode the string "REDHANDED". Once you include the short rests that are needed, we're talking 44 binary bits or 22 ternary bits. And if you want the long rests to distinguish properly the spaces between words, then 22 ternary bits won't do it; you need the full 44 binary bits.
The fact that the sequence can be interpreted as REDHANDED with a particular way of grouping the input is just being cute. Regardless of the grouping, it is a binary encoding of a 22-bit number, and so would have a one-in-2^22 chance of being reproduced at random.
Edit: To clarify: You're saying they should've mentioned 22-bits in the context of binary digits without mentioning Morse code, and if they did want to bring up Morse code they should've used trits or more bits to encode the stops. I'm saying that the fact that their 22-bit sequence can be interpreted in Morse code as a relevant word is just dressing, and does not detract from the point that the sequence was likely copied. Put another way, if someone tried to counter by saying their sequence could've been generated independently because "AU5EWRFE" and many other strings also encode to the same sequence, it would not affect the facts at all.
>but this is triggering one of my pet peeves about common misunderstandings of Morse code.
and my post is about how there is no misunderstanding.
https://searchengineland.com/google-to-add-attribution-to-li...
The dismissal seems logical to me
But physical analogies to IP fall apart quickly so I'm not going to encourage people to read into that too deeply
If you find something verbatim identical in a bunch of different places, you've got a strong case that it's just information, because if it were original creative output it wouldn't show up identically in multiple places.
If it turns out everyone was plagiarizing a single source, but you were unaware and took down the offending content when asked, you won't have much in the way of legal liability.
That said, it would've been just if Google would pay for access to Genius' particular, well-curated, "source" database of lyrics, especially given that they're basically stealing traffic.
Here's an interesting question: if Genius closed up shop tomorrow, how long would it take Google to become the primary source of song lyrics online (by rebuilding Genius's dataset from general Internet harvesting)?
Even if Google scraped it on purpose in order to steal traffic, it would likely be legal.
It is all ironic given how aggressive Google are in blocking any attempts to scrape its content.
It's just the war that is being fought, not some sort of hypocrisy or irony.
We live in a society of laws. Even soldiers. Google have shown they have no respect for the law not equality before it and will cheat while using the law as a cudgel. Recall law exists that the strongest might not always get their way. "Ironic" is the pole way of pointing this out.
Without law, Google cease to exist immediately. They are incapable of enforcing property rights without it.
Pardons aside, soldiers go to jail for taking an attitude like Google's.
Ironically, it is Genius that seems to have no respect for copyright law. Genius ended up having to settle a case years ago because they were using lyrics without the appropriate licensing [1].
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/business/media/rap-genius...
(And to head off the obvious: rate-limiting is orthogonal to whether the high-request-rate querient is scraping.)
But.. it's not illegal?
> somewhat, per things like the Americans with Disabilities Act
This is just not right at all. There is nothing in the Americans with Disabilities Act that make blocking scrapers illegal.
I think you mean you don't like the power imbalance of the large company taking away from smaller companies while using technological means to stop the same thing happening to them.
I don't like it either, but that doesn't magically make it is illegal. I'm not even sure it should be.
Retrieving, processing, and displaying information in a manner contrary to the wishes of the provider of that information is necessary for accessibility to disabled users. As a specific example, any attempt to block use of wget for scraping also blocks use of wget as part of a `wget | filter | text-to-speech` pipeline[0], and is thus a discrimination against blind or otherwise visually impaired users. The ADA is, as mentioned, only somewhat effective in prohibiting such things, though.
> it's not illegal
> that doesn't magically make it is illegal.
I don't think anyone is claiming that scraping itself actually is legally protected - I interpreted DigitalSea and harry8 as implying that it should be.
0: in either the shell sense or the workflow sense
This is not the case. Unfortunately (?) the ADA doesn't allows the disabled person to specify their own technology. If Google can reasonably say that speech to text works via a standard screenreader (which it does) then they are ok.
> The ADA is, as mentioned, only somewhat effective in prohibiting such things, though
Well that's not the intent of the ADA, so not really surprising.
> The Unicorn tier is for large companies or companies that would like to have a reciprocal relationship with our foundation. If you need special guarantees, indemnities or require us to sign your contract for a data license, please select this tier. If you have another creative idea you would like to propose, please also select the unicorn tier.
> For any of these cases, please detail your request in the company information field and we will work with you to fit your company's mythical situation. We will also find an appropriate monthly support amount to our non-profit foundation of $1500 or more per month. Please always consider enabling the growth of our non-profit foundation and the continuous growth of our metadata!
Google appears to do this for other things, asking questions often shows answers without needing to visit the website. Perhaps these are all licensed and there is a kick back for these sites...
Google appear to be serving ads on content other people have collated while eliminating the source of traffic to the original site.. If that isn’t unfair business practice and taking advantage of their monopoly on search I don’t know what is.
"Unfair competetion" has a specific legal meaning. As I understand primarily in the US it's under state law. Here's a summary: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/unfair_competition
I agree that this Google practice looks dodgy to me. But the question is, what law specifically is being broken? This looks like a copyright case, and if that's the issue, then the copyright holder is the generally the one who has to bring the case in. (I believe there are exceptions such as when exclusive rights are granted, but I haven't seen a justification that they apply here.) That's what the law requires; otherwise the courts would be even more swamped.
Again, I'm not a lawyer.
Still, Google is being very fucking evil here. It's as if they stole that $70M for themselves.
Your abuse of words is a heinous crime against humanity.
In Genius's case, does it disallow Google for scraping?
From their robots.txt, I can't tell:
Genius is given a way out to prevent itself from being scrapped.
But it doesn't. Mean they probably value traffic from Google.
Which means they are only not OK with scraping when Google uses the scrapped for purpose they deemed reduced their traffic
Obviously. The way the profit model for the internet works right now, for sites to coexist with Google, they must actually receive some of the traffic that is generated from searches matching their content. Who would be okay with having all of their content scraped with the result being that they get none of the traffic and thus the monetary benefit from the work they do?
You don't have a right to access their service as many times as you want to, eg by automated means, although you can attempt it. Flip a coin on whether they sue to stop you if you become too annoying.
The Genius complaint is essentially that they want to be represented in Google search without having Google take lyrics from their service and use them in their own served-up content snippets (making a sizable part of the value of genius.com void). Genius knows Google can get lyrics elsewhere if they have to, the lawsuit is probably out of spite due to past conflict with Google and their annoyance at Google competing with them in a shady way (Google was de facto using Genius's service to reduce the value of Genius).
Original copyright holder could give someone else authorisation to sue on their behalf, e.g., through an assignment. Doubtful Genius got an assignment in the agreements they have with publishers.
Also, Google claimed it is sub-licensed to re-publish through a third party, LyricFind, which has licenses with "over 4000" music publishers.
They can't assign the bare right to sue. To have standing the plaintiff will need to hold at least one of the exclusive rights in 17 U.S. Code § 106 aiui. Cf Righthaven cases, Silvers v Sony Pictures
So I don't think genius ever had standing to pursue this case.
Again, not a lawyer. But you'd think the actual lawyers would have checked this more carefully.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/09/victory-ruling-hiq-v-l...
I feel like this is a forgotten bit of history but for years Genius didn't pay royalties for reproducing lyrics instead choosing to claim that their own reprinting of lyrics fell under "fair use" guidelines:
>"David Lowery, frontman and songwriter for Cracker and Camper van Beethoven, is waging war on the sites he believes make money off song lyrics but don't pay the songwriter. Once he took a closer look at where his music was making money on the Internet, he realized: There were more people searching to find lyrics to his songs than searching to illegally download mp3s of his music. And he wasn't making money off those searches. Last November, after months of exhaustive and systematic Googling, he released something called The Undesirable Lyric Website List.
>"The National Music Publishers Association seized upon this list, and announced that it would be sending take-down notices to every single name. At the top of that list was the very popular Rap Genius."
>"Rap Genius has been around for a few years, and it's extremely popular. No ads, lots of traffic and, just recently, a major investment from one of the hottest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. The founder of Rap Genius, Ilan Zechory, says the site doesn't belong on Lowery's list. Because it's way more than just transcribed lyrics. He says the site is more like a social network: a discussion board for music geeks and even some of the musicians themselves — prominent rappers like Nas and Rick Ross — to comment on their own lyrics. Artists, the founders say, love the site."
>"Just this week, Rap Genius announced that, despite its opinion that the site falls under the criteria for fair use, it's going to pay songwriters for posting their lyrics. It's just easier than fighting with music publishers, who've been very successful at going after other lyric sites in the past few years. ..."[1]
[1] "https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/05/09/310462951/when...
As a result, creating an accurate lyrics database like Genius has done is an enormous amount of work, and my non-lawyer gut-feeling says that in this case, Google is screwing over Genius big time. Too bad the legal system doesn't support that.
If I scraped the most common search results from Google, front page only, and removed all the ads what would Google's argument against that be?
On one hand, so many sites make finding information difficult, on the other it feels pretty scuzzy that Google prevents searchers from clicking through to the site that put the work into generating content.
Your idea to scrape Google's search results is pithy, ironic counter-innovation at its dastardly best.
All you need to pull this off is funding for a top legal team, and deep reserves of emotional energy.
Go for it!
For example, if you include a User-Agent header and put certain strings in it, e.g., "curl/7.47", you will be blocked.
echo -e 'GET /search?q=robots.txt HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: www.google.com\r\nUser-Agent: curl/7.47\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n' |socat -,ignoreeof ssl:www.google.com,verify=0
Google probably does more (abusive) scraping than any other entity. Web scraping is in their DNA. It is in their web pages, too.
curl https://www.google.com/search/static/gs/animal/m05py0.html|grep scrape> Genius isn’t the copyright holder for these lyrics, it just licenses them itself.
Both Google and Genius are licensing the lyrics. Ironically, Genius ended up having to settle a case years ago because they were using lyrics without the appropriate licensing [1].
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/business/media/rap-genius...
You are alllowed. Google would not likely try to sue you. They will try to block you however.
Bing was created by copying Google results. Google did not sue Microsoft, but they did try to expose the copying.
Do you have a source? Just curious about the back story.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24112418
Not excusing MS, but it seems they were not wholesale copying Google results.
This is incorrect. Firefox will prompt you whether to enable search suggestions on first use, and will not fetch suggestions until you say yes.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /search/about
Allow: /search/static
Allow: /search/howsearchworksThere was a post about regulating Google like a public utility recently, but perhaps we should also consider looking at other less conventional internet "public utilities" - things like the Internet Archive, Wikipedia or essential open source projects like Debian. I think a search engine that's transparent both in terms of its logic and how it's maintained and managed might be the only way.
Google shouldn't steal Genius or Yelp content. Facebook shouldn't steal YouTuber's content, etc. etc.
It's not hard to see how if you were in the little guys shoes you'd feel screwed over. We need to innovate our laws to reflect that.
But I suppose we could say "don't scrape and present content outside of a regular search result". But then again, Google claims they haven't done so - that they got those lyrics from LyricFind, a lyric licensing platform - and Genius didn't present any evidence that this wasn't the case. So I'm not clear on how could any laws help here.
Finally, the question was not about Genius, it was about allowing competitors to Google to emerge. I don't see how would this help.
Too me this is the endgame for all of these complains about search not being ten blue links anymore. Future knowledge engines will be vast AIs that have assimilated information into internal self organized structures, and will synthesize requests for that knowledge “in its own voice”
Unless AIs are lifting content by overfitting and making exact replicas instead of expressing the same facts in an entirely new way, I don’t think people will be a able to sue especially when the process by which the answer arrived is a massive Rube Goldberg contraption with 100 billion parameters.
GPT-3 for example can already extract information from SEC EDGAR reports, a service other companies often charge money for.
>Eastern District of New York
Ugh. Basic legal literacy can no longer be expected in the media?
EDNY is a federal court, not a state one.
The real story here is left completely untold: why didn't they bring a copyright claim? Could they bring a copyright claim in the future? Could one of the owners of the copyright bring a claim? These are the questions that matter.
For some reasons, google wants to become AOoL, introducing the A with their AMP service (or with Applied Semantics).
This rises the question: Will content owners create their own content network? If Google steals your content on the internet, why put your content on the internet? Why not have an app that delivers content to paying customers? Now each content provider tries this on his own with his own app. why not combine the efforts and just offer a browser for their closed network or embrace the Brave browser? If all content producers pull this off together, the audience will be there.
Facebook could offer a Facebook content network on their own because they already have the audience, and Genius and all those Recipe sites could publish their content in a secure way. Maybe Instagram with its text pictures is already the predecessor.
It seems like Google was taken over by Applied Semantics in the same way that Boeing was taken over by McDonnell Douglas because in the long run, nobody offers up his content for search if it is ripped off.
It perfectly fits their mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".
Genius with it's annotations is much more interesting than just the lyrics in plain text.
Also Google makes you click the big down arrow before showing the complete lyrics, which makes me irrationally annoyed.
s/organize/steal
Google is blatantly ripping off companies and putting them out of business.
Didn't Google complain that Bing was copying their results a couple of years ago ?
Is it possible to have a middle ground ?
I can see both points of the argument :
- Genius does not own the lyrics, in most cases these are entered by users afaik. A similar example would be somebody adding an address/info on Google Maps.
- On the opposite end, associating a query like "that song written by blue haired 80s singer" to an actual result sounds more like a transformative work (although google owns user entered information as well here with the database of all the queries entered by users).
Would it be possible to have a framework where you can purchase such data at a fair price ?
The value add of Genius is not the lyrics anyway. I never go to Genius to just look up lyrics because the site is fairly heavy. I use another site that is lighter and has a nicer lyrics format.
The only reason I go to Genius is for the real value add - the song annotations; and these are added by volunteers.
I rarely use the Google version of the lyrics either to be honest.
Does this mean Genius still has grounds to sue, as the copyright protections are on their “work” which is the transcription?
It also seems to mean a ToS is not useful for protecting content, only determining legal users interaction with it (Excluding loading the page). A webpage is a work rendered through a browser, kinda makes sense I guess.
Compare to the whole word perfect clip art lawsuit
Derivative works are copyrightable (Translations, adapting a book to a movie), but it might be hard to argue an exact copy of the song lyrics are “derivative” as they aren’t an original creation, but simply a subset of the old work.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963365
https://searchengineland.com/google-has-officially-penalized...
Pretty funny that Google depends on them for content now.
Root cause of most of the issues seem to be monetization model of Google where they are optimising people to stay within their ecosystem.
I paid for Youtube Red, even though I never signed into the service on Youtube and even though I already got all of the Youtube-specific benefit in the form of adblocking and NewPipe. I did that purely to try and signal to Google, "I will pay for content, I want you to have revenue sources outside advertising."
But ultimately Youtube Red seems to have been a failure, my signal hasn't changed the course of the company, and the parts of Youtube Red I did get value from (say, Music) have gotten noticeably worse over the years. I'm planning to drop my subscription in September. I think it would be tough for me to buy into another product like that from Google, my experience trying to buy products from Google to get around advertising/tracking has been both a practical and moral failure. Certainly I won't sign up for a paid GSuite account now.
But I do already pay for Email (Fastmail), bookmarking (Wallabag), and a few other "free" internet services and apps today. So I might pay for search if a company like DuckDuckGo offered it instead of Google. But I would need to see what their offer actually was.
I mean, heck, I'd be giving recurring donations to DuckDuckGo today if they accepted them, they're on my list of companies I want to exist. So paying 5$ a month for a "premium" search experience wouldn't really be that different, even if I never signed into it.
https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-pages/company/do...
They seem to want you to enable their ads. Is that something you would ever do?
Different people have different reasons for disabling ads. Some people only care about egregious ads and privacy violations, that's fine.
I am against ads in general, I noticed a sharp quality of life increase when I started blocking ads universally everywhere I could, regardless of whether or not I was on the web. That's a longer conversation, I'm not going to get into it now. I respect that other people have different opinions, but I also feel reasonably strongly about my own.
I do spread DuckDuckGo to other people, but I also spread uBlock Origin, so I'm not sure I'm a net positive there either. :)
It's again, an interesting question. I've been pushing pretty hard in my personal life to financially support Open Source software that I use, projects that I really care about. DuckDuckGo is one of the few companies that I really like that I haven't ever really supported in any tangible way.
I do feel guilty about that, but not guilty enough to allow myself to be turned into a product. There is likely no company where I would ever feel guilty enough to turn on ads. But given that DuckDuckGo isn't going to allow donations any time soon, I could see a lightweight 'premium' DuckDuckGo product effectively being a way for me to just give them money without it feeling to them like it's a donation.
Actually, what I should do is to look into some of their merch and see what they offer and if they actually make a profit on it. I thought at one point DuckDuckGo sold shirts or something, but I don't know if they still do. Again though, this all kind of ends up being a messy proxy for donations. I'm not super-jazzed about walking around as a living billboard either, even for a company I like.
I'd happily pay 10€/m for better results though.
Can't remember the source but G make around ~$70 per 1000 searches. Bing make less than half than this, DDG less again.
G commands higher rates because of higher competition for ads and also because of its retargeting and all the other methods that raise that per 1000 figure higher.
To answer your question (sort of), Google's non-ad version would need to be expensive to break even with its current model.
That alone makes too different an experience.
They have played the game and lost and now they are desperate. They should have got some adults in the room before it was too late.
Basically it sounds like the court said “scraping data against TOC and publishing scraped data at best amounts to a copyright violation”
Part of Linkedin vs HiQ ruling.
Rich snippets are all stolen pageviews. To make matters worse, they now don't let the site which is featured in the snippet have a secondary ranking further down the page.
They keep adding schema, which SEOs eat up because it provides a secondary level of content optimization but it's not as effective as it used to be for increasing CTR on your serp results.
The one positive of this is I no longer have to goto recipe sites which overload my screen with ads and put the ingredients 50% down the page. Google just scrapes the content and displays it in the snippet box.
It's leverage to force companies into picking being stolen from or being never seen.
They need to be declared a monopoly and put on a very short leash here. I hope something comes of the hearings in Washington late last month.
At the end of the day, Genius has probably spent thousands of man years collecting the lyrics and Google free rides on that getting it all in seconds.
Sucks to be Genius but if they want people to visit they need to provide something more than "facts".
As for the idea that Google scraped the site, as pointed out elsewhere, they didn't, their contractors may have, the contractor pointed out to Genius that the same results Genius was complaining about were on many other sites (maybe those sites copied from Genius as well). The contractor offer to remove many copies anyway, Genius didn't respond.
Further, this is exactly the kind of thing that is probably not too far from automating via speech recognition and/or ad partnering. If it was me, I'd consider trying to partner with the music companies, send us the lyrics and we'll link to your site/band/videos...
Spoken like someone who's never looked up lyrics online before. Genius is to lyrics what Stack Overflow is to programming questions. In both cases there were/are other sites doing the same thing, but they are ad-riddled, inaccurate, incomplete, and sometimes paywalled.
Genius already has deals with the music companies for the licences required to display the lyrics.[1]
Someone stated under a different comment thread on this story that music companies will only provide the licence, so Genius has to source the lyrics separately.
But I do not understand how any of this is relevant to Genius getting their content taken by Google's contractors. If Google displays that content on their own website, no-one will click through to Genius.
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/business/media/rap-genius...