I might be wrong, but IIRC, CR used to be a fan-sub type of site; I don't recall if they hosted stuff, or just linked to it. When I first found them, though, that's how they seemed to be. But since then, I think they license all of their content now or something like that. I may be totally wrong here, keep that in mind...
Reminds me of Spotify during the invite only service (2008ish?), when a lot of albums still had scene release tags in their titles from the mp3 scraping.
Pretty sure that's the main reason Genius will have difficulty pursuing this case. Google isn't infringing their copyright, because they can't copyright someone else's work, and I doubt the unique pattern of apostrophes is enough of an infringement to claim Google stole, it merely proves the source of the content was them.
It does, at the least, suggest Google is paying someone who less than ethically sources their data though.
Copyrights, patents, and trademarks have clear limits. An overly expansive theory of copyright would be stifling to innovation and free expression.
It was sourced from someone who was liberal about taking legal risks, but I have a hard time seeing what ethical rights were broken. Indeed, the opposite theory is that if we don't exercise out rights, they go away and Google's source is risking litigation to preserve our rights.
The rightsholder here are the artists and their proxies (publishers and agents), not Genius. I wouldn't feel bad of they asked for a takedown or royalties.
You can have a copyrighted derivative of a copyrighted subject - for example, buying a stock photo of the eiffel tower at night pays both the photographer and the lighting designer; and buying a translated book pays both the original author and the translator. This is known as a "derivative work".
However, to be copyrightable as a derivative, work must contain sufficient new expression to satisfy copyright law's requirement of originality. So you can't copyright a photocopy of a book, for example.
Presumably Genius thinks their lyrics are analogous to the photograph, rather than the photocopy; they may not own the lyrics, but they own this particular transcription of the lyrics.
1) Extremely recent Repost https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194952
2) I find it extremely aggravating how needlessly accusatory the title is. It presumes guilt when its still technically an accusation
The presumption of innocence is supposed to be a shared value of western culture, of which the WSJ is part of. Unfortunately we all know the narrative they're trying to frame here.
> Starting around 2016, Genius said, the company made a subtle change to some of the songs on its website, alternating the lyrics’ apostrophes between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song.
> When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words “Red Handed.”
Can Google really be so stupid/careless to just scrape Genius directly? Their explanation that they source these lyrics from someone, which in turn apparently scrapes Genius seems more plausible to me.
It’s indeed a lot more likely that LyricFind, from whom Google buys the content, scrapes the lyrics.
Why risk showing stolen content when you are already paying for them?
I understand that Genius focuses on Google though. That makes the story a lot more interesting for publications like WSJ that have a bit of a anti-Google campaign going on.
That is interesting; I did something like this decades ago for a former employer. To give an idea of the era, all the developers worked on green-screen dumb terminals (PCs were still a fairly expensive thing for a small business like this one - we had a few for training purposes, and our sysadmin had one - and that was about it; our main dev machine we hooked up to was a IBM RS/6000 workstation running AIX).
In the source code, in comments I'd put in a varying number of spaces to spell out a copyright phrase; that way, if some comments were removed, it would mostly still be present. It was later used to defend a case of stolen code from what I recall, though I had moved on from that company by then.
It wasn't as sophisticated as this, though; IIRC, mine was just a number of spaces to indicated basic symbols to spell out the phrase and nothing more. At the time, I was 19 years old, and hadn't been doing software dev for very long - young and naive, though that had its advantages back then.
For pure lyrics viewing azlyrics might be better (I don't think so), but Genius is so much more than just raw lyrics. I love the comments / interpretations by other users.
They don’t really own the lyrics in any case. In traditional publishing you would have to pay the original artist to reproduce the lyrics, as you have to do for poems and other lyrical works.
Sure, but to whom? If your web site has data or works you uploaded but have no particular rights to, you can't prevent someone else from reusing it if you've given them access to download. Royalties are fine -- it depends on where you draw the line on fair use -- but they should go to the artist or publisher, not a random web site with no particular rights to the work who just happened to aggregate it. That's not how IP works.
Anyone here remember lyrics.ch and their inevitable takedown?
The copyright situation is not complicated; lyric copyright resides with the songwriter, and is usually sublicensed exclusively to the publisher. Like Napsterisation, these were forced open by hugely widespread infringement, and eventually a stalemate has been reached between publishers and the internet.
Like youtube, this will result in lots of weird anomalies where ownership is disputed and the publishers claim all sorts of things they're not technically entitled to.
Like a lot of other things, the publisher may never have made a clean official copy of the lyrics available, so the actual compilation is done by third parties - but that doesn't grant them a formal copyright in that work. (Unless the weird sui generis right of databases comes into play)
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 71.1 ms ] threadI might be wrong, but IIRC, CR used to be a fan-sub type of site; I don't recall if they hosted stuff, or just linked to it. When I first found them, though, that's how they seemed to be. But since then, I think they license all of their content now or something like that. I may be totally wrong here, keep that in mind...
It does, at the least, suggest Google is paying someone who less than ethically sources their data though.
Copyrights, patents, and trademarks have clear limits. An overly expansive theory of copyright would be stifling to innovation and free expression.
It was sourced from someone who was liberal about taking legal risks, but I have a hard time seeing what ethical rights were broken. Indeed, the opposite theory is that if we don't exercise out rights, they go away and Google's source is risking litigation to preserve our rights.
The rightsholder here are the artists and their proxies (publishers and agents), not Genius. I wouldn't feel bad of they asked for a takedown or royalties.
However, to be copyrightable as a derivative, work must contain sufficient new expression to satisfy copyright law's requirement of originality. So you can't copyright a photocopy of a book, for example.
Presumably Genius thinks their lyrics are analogous to the photograph, rather than the photocopy; they may not own the lyrics, but they own this particular transcription of the lyrics.
> When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words “Red Handed.”
Clever. Reminds me of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street.
Can Google really be so stupid/careless to just scrape Genius directly? Their explanation that they source these lyrics from someone, which in turn apparently scrapes Genius seems more plausible to me.
https://searchengineland.com/bing-why-googles-wrong-in-its-a...
Why risk showing stolen content when you are already paying for them?
I understand that Genius focuses on Google though. That makes the story a lot more interesting for publications like WSJ that have a bit of a anti-Google campaign going on.
In the source code, in comments I'd put in a varying number of spaces to spell out a copyright phrase; that way, if some comments were removed, it would mostly still be present. It was later used to defend a case of stolen code from what I recall, though I had moved on from that company by then.
It wasn't as sophisticated as this, though; IIRC, mine was just a number of spaces to indicated basic symbols to spell out the phrase and nothing more. At the time, I was 19 years old, and hadn't been doing software dev for very long - young and naive, though that had its advantages back then.
azlyrics is SO MUCH better. I'd rather see them at the top instead of Genius.
The copyright situation is not complicated; lyric copyright resides with the songwriter, and is usually sublicensed exclusively to the publisher. Like Napsterisation, these were forced open by hugely widespread infringement, and eventually a stalemate has been reached between publishers and the internet.
Like youtube, this will result in lots of weird anomalies where ownership is disputed and the publishers claim all sorts of things they're not technically entitled to.
Like a lot of other things, the publisher may never have made a clean official copy of the lyrics available, so the actual compilation is done by third parties - but that doesn't grant them a formal copyright in that work. (Unless the weird sui generis right of databases comes into play)