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Comment by dangero | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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