Comment by sgentle | Hacker News Reader

Comment by sgentle | Hacker News Reader

This is a bizarre take. The most substantial point is buried near the end of the article: Genius does not own the copyright to the lyrics. Yes, they may have taken billions of painstaking person-years to hand-transcribe them onto artisanal silks, but no matter how much effort you put into copying someone else's work, it doesn't make it your work, and you can't sue people over it. At best, you could claim your copy is a derivative work, but that only grants you protection for your additional creative contributions on top of the original work, which for a straight transcription is... well, nothing.

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.

You seem focused on whether this case was the legally correct decision, which it sure seems to be. This article, like many readers, is more focused on whether this was a fair result. Nothing bizarre about that.

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...

The law decides fair. It's not subjective.

But the law can be unfair, and can even be made more fair, and for that, you need discussion.

Law also says that erratic criminals can be restrained by kneeling on them, one of the reasons which hastened George Floyd's death. I don't think law is always right.

Emotional appeals shouldn’t* hold any weight when considering the law. You’ll end up creating highly biased or illogical laws that cater to the culture of the times and need to be changed again shortly. Kneeling may cause the death of some but save the lives of countless others. “The law isn’t always right” isn’t an objective statement because “right” is relative to the observer.

This seems like a fully general case against making or changing any law ever.

The last sentence without the context of the preceding sentences would seem that way, yes. However in the context of “laws created as a response to emotional appeals” it becomes a warning to remember that everyone has feelings and everyone’s feelings are different when creating or considering the law.

That isn’t an apt comparison — Kneeling on someone’s neck is never going to save countless lives.

> You’ll end up creating highly biased or illogical laws that cater to the culture of the times

yes this has often happened

> and need to be changed again

the thing is, they often don't get changed.

The entirety of law is an appeal to emotion.

Law endeavours, or let me say: should endeavour...

To be fair.

And fairness is entirely a human emotional pursuit.

Laws are very much subjective. They're results of their time and the people in charge of voting them. That's why the US still has people in jail for life for non violent weed related crimes while you can now legally buy and consume weed in half of the country.

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.

But, in that sense, fairness is also subjective. There are viewpoints that call what Google did unfair and viewpoints that call it fair. What overarching philosophy do we use to decide which is the right viewpoint?

Genius is a YC company and HN is a YC-owned forum, so this is probably not the best venue for an unbiased discussion on fairness

> Laws are very much subjective.

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.

why is this downvoted? Without getting into a debate about what true objectivity is and whether or not it exists, In the US, the majority of laws are objective; and it's the application of those laws that is subjective.

This could be an issue of articles: Laws are objective; the law is subjective.

Laws consist of literal syntax, but that does not make a Law "objective". Wittgenstein made issue of the fallability of the English language. English is not a special case (just the applicable one).

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.

In a common-law system the written (legislated) law is not actually the law, it's the court's interpretation of how it should be applied, taking into account similarities to other laws and the precedents set in applying them, that determines what it actually means. That makes it quite subjective and vulnerable to initial precedents in applying it.

There is no end to this debate. The buck stops at the law. As of today this is fair and objective. Without this we have no framework to judge right or wrong. You can handwave around this but this is the best jurisprudence has come up with over the years. Do you have a better system than pitchforks on HN?

You can't just say "there is no end" and follow it with "my end is the right end".

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.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deontological_ethics

Why do you think that law is necessarily deontological? There are many areas of the law in the US that tilt towards consequentialism, such as antitrust law (does it harm the consumer?)

The law is not "fair and objective". It is a representation of the morals of the particular group holding power at the time of its writing.

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.

Enforcement of laws should be as objective as possible. The laws themselves are very much subjectively created.

> One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

MLK

> The law decides fair. It's not subjective.

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?

In a democracy the government is inherently an extension of the people and so when you frame it as fair meaning whatever the government defines it as you are, at the same time, acknowledging that the majority have already decided the matter to be fair. Whether or not those people are willing to admit to the world or themselves that they believe the law to be moral, it is from their consent as a mass that the law was able to manifest. So at the very least the law is what most people most people think is morally fair.

In aggregate maybe. But surely there are specific laws which a majority think are unfair.

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.

The US is not a democracy by definition, and even if you want to substitute in “republic” here, the description of how the law-making sausage factory works here is idealistic at best.

How do we get new laws, or changes to old laws? It seems to me that process involves people deciding what is fair.

If only history had any examples of unfair laws...

Laws are exactly like released legacy code. They work and occasionally they fail.

They can be better, but you have to understand them to know how to improve them.

I don't understand how your second sentence follows from the first.

Perhaps you mean: they are full of bugs, fragile, broken, but occasionally they work?

It seems I respect working code more than you do. I wouldn't say laws are broken.

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.

Plenty of laws are broken. Drug control laws, white collar crime laws, whistleblower protections, copyright, IP, patent, child support & alimony, parent-child access / visitation, execution or the lack of it, gun control or the lack of it, fucking mandatory sentencing.

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.

I think your parent was just trying to say "laws are important".

"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.

I guess that's why progressive taxation is fair! /s

Laws decide nothing. They are just a bunch of rules made up by those in power. Way too many of them are the direct result of lobbying by billion dollar industries. Copyright is an example. People vote for and elect representatives and they end up serving these elite groups instead. How is that fair?

If you believe any given law is unfair, it is your duty to disobey. This is called civil disobedience.

The law decides what is allowed. Society decides what is fair.

> Yes, they may have taken billions of painstaking person-years to hand-transcribe them onto artisanal silks, but no matter how much effort you put into copying someone else's work, it doesn't make it your work, and you can't sue people over it.

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.

Yes, they did, because they got a takedown from the actual copyright holders: https://www.billboard.com/articles//5785701/nmpa-targets-unl...

You are correct about Genius also scrapping in the beginning.

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.

Aren't collections of facts copyrightable? So google has copyright over google maps and I can not copy that but I can go out and record exactly the same data since I collected it myself.

I would guess maps is a different case because those are their own works. There are decisions on design being made, how to show overlays. But that’s just my assumption.

Why does it matter whether you're transcribing lyrics or transcribing geography? In both cases you're effectively just writing down something that exists already.

The equivalent would be to copy an existing map, not to create a map based on your observations of the world.

But what google did here was not listening to every song and writing down the lyrics. They just copied the text off another website.

Exactly. This should definitely be grounds for allowing copying google maps data as long as you render it in your own style. The usual trick here is trap data where map makers insert fake data to catch copies but thats exactly what happened here with the ' in the lyrics.

Just add some small, inconsequential error to all positional data.

Does this mean Genius can add a few non-breaking spaces to the lyrics, with a couple of odd unicode characters that look like periods and commas.

I guess at some point it’d end up looking like a ReCaptcha and there’s enough of those already ...

Thats exactly what they did with commas. Didn't help them.

If the actual data isn't copyrightable, yet the 'fake/trap data' is, then presumably when one copies the map, a court will decide that the magnitude of the copying is very small - only a single apostrophe was copied - and therefore the damages negligible.

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?

Fred Saberhagen made this a plot point in one of his Berserker stories. Going by my highly suspect memory...

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.

I don't know about copyrights for maps, but your argument is not good: You can't copyright a flower, but take a picture of that flower and the rights to the picture belong to you. Google is not preventing others from collecting mapping data, but they prevent them from copying the data Google has collected.

This is a classic example of the map not being the teritory that I think gets the point across: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"

The land is there. Depicting it is the result of Google's work. You went over, or used a satellite photo with the appropriate licensing and YOU painted (created) the map.

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.

Because you are allowed to (I presume) copy the raw data (gps coordinates of roads, buildings, etc.) But you don’t have access to it, instead you only see their map design.

No, in the US you cannot copyright facts, only expression. So you have control over word-for-word copies of your article about a bird; but you have no control over dissemination of the facts you discovered about the bird. SCOTUS decided this in 1991, Feist v. Rural: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....

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

The US does recognise compilations as copyrightable though (but there must be decisions made about what to include).

See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/images/6/6f/Protection_of_C...

It could be a system, oracle, or network, which computes weights or votes, just as soon as it could be an individual or group casting ballots or deliberating. The deciding is key, perhaps not who decides. Some aspects of law are slippery like that though, where one set of rules applies to human agents, and a different, perhaps mutually exclusive set, apply to everything else.

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.

Right. "Expression" isn't restricted to specific wording, it can potentially mean specific choices of what is included and what is included in a compilation; I could hold a copyright to such a compilation even if I don't hold the copyright to any of the items in the copyright.

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.

Compilations of facts are copyrightable in the US, but they can't be just raw collections - there has to be a choice made what to include.

> 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...

Regarding compilations of facts, the general doctrine is that copyright would protect the semi-arbitary choices of what to include in that compilation (e.g. judgement of relevance - which words to put in dictionary, what detail to include/exclude in a map) and disallows copying that compilation; but it explicitly does not protect "work and sweat" required to gather that data, and allows people to copy particular facts out of that compilation, for example, if they are making their own selection with different criteria, as the underlying facts are not protected no matter how much effort it took to obtain them.

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.

> Genius does not own the copyright to the lyrics. Yes, they may have taken billions of painstaking person-years to hand-transcribe them onto artisanal silks, but no matter how much effort you put into copying someone else's work, it doesn't make it your work, and you can't sue people over it.

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...

Google says they also license: https://blog.google/products/search/how-we-help-you-find-lyr...

True, though that blog post also says "We do not crawl or scrape websites to source these lyrics.", which was definitely not true (though may be now).

I think it was true then. I believe their claim was usage via third party?

Google licenses the lyrics through a third party, LyricFind, which in turn hired people to transcribe them. In a small percentage of cases, those transcribers did not do their own work and instead copied lyrics from Genius.

Where I live, there is a database right.

The fact that Genius collated those works is meaningful work in its own right.

I'm not sure what your background is but your analysis sounds quite strong opiniated.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com