Study Prompts NMPA to File Take-Down Notices Against 50 Lyric Websites | Hacker News Reader

Study Prompts NMPA to File Take-Down Notices Against 50 Lyric Websites

pitchfork.com

63 pointssubimage56 comments

I'm hoping that Rap Genius will fight this as I'm pretty sure Hofheinz v A&E Television Networks sets the precedent for them. The ruling there was that a documentary on Peter Graves was okay because clips from the actor's works were used "for the transformative purpose of enabling the viewer to understand the actor's modest beginnings in the film business," and that "A&E's biography of Peter Graves does not merely purport to supersede the original movie at issue, but to create a new copyrightable film biography."

Each of the annotated Rap Genius lyrics are used to explain and understand where the original artist is coming from and the point of the site isn't just to let people know the lyrics (which is at best half of the work being used, if you were concerned with the 3rd of the criteria on fair use) but to provide original content that explains everything. I don't think they would have a problem winning, but the will and money to win might be a problem :s

I'm not aware of any more recent case law that might supersede this as it has been a few years since I've been in an IP Law class. Anyone know more?

The key difference here is that Rap Genius does not use clips, but rather the entire lyrical work. Also it's important to note that often times the lyrics on Rap Genius contain no annotation, so in that case, it is not the same situation of referencing bits of work to create a new work.

It may be all the words, but it is not the entire lyrical work. Intonation and cadence are incredibly important for the genre. Songs like Freeway, Kanye and Mos Def's "2 Words" do not have even close to the same impact without being heard.

Also, the entire work includes the beat. I'm guessing Kanye would argue the beat to "2 Words" was pretty important too.

I think a pretty close comparison would be a complete transcript of a movie or television program.

I know a lot of the songs up there don't have much in the way of annotations, but wouldn't an album review heavy with lyrical analysis be more appropriate in this case?

In the case of a heavily annotated song, I agree that's a decent comparison.

In a weird way, it would seem that every song on RapGenius starts off nearly naked of annotation, and — it would seem — essentially illegal, but may end up heavily annotated and “transformative.”

You can’t start at the end, though.

One is reminded of mathematical induction. Somehow, though, I don’t expect the law to agree that because lyrics-prime is a legal, transformative work, that lesser-annotated copies are therefore also legal. IANAL

A better comparison would be reviewing a song by uploading it to Soundcloud and then using the 'annotate at this timestamp' feature to review it. If you didn't have permission to do so (as far as I know, Soundcloud has no licences in place) then you would be infringing copyright, and a takedown could be fairly issued. This is functionally the same due to the dual-licence nature of music copyrights.

I see where you're coming from, but that argument opens up a pretty big loophole to use any copyrighted material however you please. There's a big difference (in terms of both effort and value) between a documentary and some user-generated annotations of varying quality.

I'm not clear what you mean by "at best half of the work being used" regarding lyrics, since the full lyrics are reproduced.

Most of the fair use case law I have seen doesn't try to differentiate between good and bad commentary about the work they are building upon because it's really tricky and subjective.

Also, with "at best half of the work being used" I was referring to the fact that it is just lyrics and doesn't include the other elements of the song.

Ah, I see. AFAIK the lyrics and the recording are considered distinct works with separate copyright (and often different owners), so the lyrics count as the "full" work in this case.

I think you might be right about that. I vaguely remember that weird difference being part of the way Hallmark has managed to hold the copyright to Happy Birthday. If I remember correctly, the lyrics were way out of copyright, but the piano arrangement that was written in the 30s or 40s and is now in common use now was copyrightable. Bleh.

@alex_c is right: the recorded iteration of the song is one licence, and the music and lyrics (covered by the publishing licence) is another. If Rap Genius haven't licensed the music and lyrics, then it's no different legally to filesharing mp3s.

Whatever the intent of Rap Genius, at the end of the day, if they're using material that somebody else has the publishing rights to without asking permission, then they need to pay or take it down. Simple as that.

Why was the original link and title I submitted edited?

Please change it back:

http://subimage.com/blog/2013/11/12/startup-rapgenius-among-...

Because it is "blogspam" and against the policies of this site.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

It is already at least the second submission of this story in the last 24 hours. The previous one is here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6722938

It's not "blogspam" - it gave a nod to the place I saw it originally, while providing a unique perspective on the subject because of my experience.

1 - The Pitchfork article didn't mention any numbers relating to what the license cost. 2 - I gave context into who David Lowery is 3 - The headline included RapGenius, which most people find news on interesting

That information was provided by me, after discussions with song publishers & research. Changing the title & URL is extremely disrespectful.

All of that is fine and probably true but doesn't respond to the rule from the FAQ:

Please submit the original source. If a blog post reports on something they found on another site, submit the latter.

I'd suggest posting your additions to the comments here to stir the discussion.

I was excited to read your article because based on this comment I thought it would have in-depth analysis of the issue, but I found it to be a very shallow in terms of additional content. It has one paragraph with the licensing costs, which is useful information, and then the two sentence blurb on David Lowery, which didn't seem to be meaningfully connected to the issue at all (it actually is somewhat negative in my view, because it seems to imply a slight hint of perhaps ad hominem, but that was just my initial impression, and doesn't seem totally justified upon rereading). If you had multiple discussions with song publishers and research on this topic, it would definitely be valuable to share them.

With respect to disrespect, Hacker News exists for the benefit of its readers, and not necessarily for the benefit of the Internet's citizen-journalist army. Hacker News admins prefer "canonical" sources in most situations. That said, I wouldn't consider your post "blogspam."

I did appreciate finding out who David Lowery is in the context of research.

Because they classify it as blog spam, despite explicitly requesting it if you have your own comment to make.

> If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.

I don't see this in the guidelines. Was it recently removed?

EDIT: Nevermind, I found it in this paragraph:

Don't abuse the text field in the submission form to add commentary to links. The text field is for starting discussions. If you're submitting a link, put it in the url field. If you want to add initial commentary on the link, write a blog post about it and submit that instead.

That's exactly what I did, and they changed the link and modified the discussion!

Notice, people below were talking about RapGenius specifically, their VC, and how much a license costs - yet that stopped once the editors modified the URL & headline.

This is really quite silly to me.

Lyrical content can't be "sold" to consumers - it can only be used in promotional material. I can't imagine how anyone would be able to calculate damages for punitive action, but I can't imagine that it's very easily demonstrable, except directly to the licensing company who would supposedly otherwise be paid the licensing fees.

To me, this resembles a flailing music industry fishing for revenue.

At the same time, the published material itself is certainly copyrighted.

Does anyone believe these sites are, in any way, not helping the artists?

OTOH, when a site wraps ads around lyrics, why should all of the ad revenue go to the site and none to the songwriter? Effectively the lyrics are being "sold" in exchange for the user's attention.

That is true under a maximalist interpretation of copyright. On the other hand, what is really being sold here is the transcription and search-ability of the lyrics (and in RapGenius's specific case the community-contributed critical analysis of the lyrics).

Since the near total majority of people who will be reading the lyrics already posses a copy in audio form it seems unfair, in anything other than a maximalist context, to pay for them twice.

RG, and the others, rely pretty much exclusively on song lyrics to pull traffic from Google.

It's impossible to know who possesses what song in audio form, and it's up to RG if the pass that cost on to their users if they wish to.

>Since the near total majority of people who will be reading the lyrics already posses a copy in audio form

If you mean "legally possess", I very strongly doubt that's true...

It's not maximalist to say that a website cannot make a copy of something for someone who owns the item in another form. That right to copy belongs to the copyright owner, not the person who owns a copy.

For argument's sake let's say you are right, that it is not maximalist. That would imply there is a more extreme interpretation that would qualify as maximalist.

Can you describe what that interpretation might be? What is more extreme than saying without exception that the "right to copy belongs to the copyright owner, not the person who owns a copy."

Meanwhile, I'll just leave this right here: http://www.ripshark.com/

Agree. Silly and not a huge deal. Beyond that, buying the rights wouldn't be expensive.

"obtaining a blanket license to “re-publish” lyrics online from someone like musiXmatch starts around $20k/year."

Doesn't sound too bad for a company that raised 17M.

Beyond that RG still has a ton of room to expand into other areas.

If the cost really is only $20k, I find it hard to believe that RG finds this small price to be unreasonable...

I imagine RG considers it unreasonable because they consider what they are doing to be fair use. As such, any amount above $0 could be considered unreasonable.

Not only that, but RG has also gotten a ton of positive feedback from artists.

The question is this: Do the founders wish to be provocative and make a point about the music industry, or do they want to avoid friction? After watching a few interviews with the founding team, I wouldn't be surprised if it was the former.

Would it be fair use to put the script of every movie and TV show online?

There is no way that any specific licensing source, or even handful of licensing sources, is comprehensive.

If you accept that this use does not qualify as fair use then in good conscience you can only display the lyrics for which you have purchased a license. That cripples the coverage you can provide by making it too resource-intensive to seek out a licensing agreement for the lyrics of more obscure songs.

The keyword is "starts". RapGenius has millions of page views, and musiXmatch's API pricing is "variable and based on volume and needs".

Considering the fact that numerous artists on Rap Genius comment and participate on their and other's lyrics, I would imagine that the artists certainly see a benefit. (http://rapgenius.com/verified-artists)

Why wouldn't they just buy the license? 20k/yr for a blanket license sounds incredibly cheap...what am I missing?

If I were RapGenius I would welcome the payment because it would clear out a ton of competitors and duplicate content in one fell swoop.

The license is probably not entirely static, most likely based on traffic like paid web fonts. My guess is that it would be significantly more expensive for Rap Genius.

The license cost starts at 20k/year with 1.4 USD license fee per 1000 views (CPM) for websites and mobile apps. The licensing of 1.4 USD CPM alone is more than normal sites can hope to earn from 1000 page impressions.

Source: https://developer.musixmatch.com/

Maybe they should sue over the price.

I don't think it's realistic to expect to get the lyrics for free.

http://www.lyricfind.com/services/lyrics-for-free/

The "undesirability index" is seriously just google search popularity for random popular songs, plus whether or not they pay.

The "undesirability index" is hilariously loaded terminology, along with really quite questionable methodology. They weight each spot on the google results based on the first result being 1, the second being .995, the third being .990, and so on. It seems like it would make a lot more sense to weight it based on traffic. The first result should be like .4, the second .2, the third .1, and lyrics appearing on pages two through 20(!) should be scaled down to the infinitesimal value they represent. www.digitaldreamdoor.com has an "undesirability index" of 2.35, vs. rapgenius' 12.77, but in terms of actual traffic, that ratio is probably off by an order of magnitude (trafficestimate.com estimates 7M uniques vs. 422K, which is still unreliable, but it's something).

Never thought I'd see a Pitchfork article on the frontpage of HN.

It didn't start as that. They edited my original title & link...

http://subimage.com/blog/2013/11/12/startup-rapgenius-among-...

Here's an example of a licensed lyric site: http://www.lyricsoverload.com/

And a mobile app that uses licensed lyric content: http://musixmatch.com/apps/

lyrics without errors. what a concept.

I would appreciate upvotes on my original article - as a HN editor changed the URL and title once this hit the front page.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6723445

Thank you!

It would be better for everyone if writers could get paid for views of their lyrics. It would set a precedent for paying the artist. Even if it's just a few ten-thousandths of a penny per view.

If a program that process songs and returns lyrics are an copyright infringement, is a program that process songs and return song titles an equal copyright infringement?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com