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.)
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
If I was going to scrape this data and re-purpose it, I would've absolutely cleaned up those apostrophes. The pivoting between straight and curly would certainly be a pet peeve. Unless there's a semantic difference between the two I'm unaware of.
I'm not disputing that they proved their point, but this is triggering one of my pet peeves about common misunderstandings of Morse code.
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:
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.
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.
(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.)
> LyricFind. LyricFind is a Google licensing partner, and may be the source of the Genius content appearing in Google’s search results. LyricFind published an explanation on its web site Monday, saying, “Some time ago, Ben Gross from Genius notified LyricFind that they believed they were seeing Genius lyrics in LyricFind’s database. As a courtesy to Genius, our content team was instructed not to consult Genius as a source. Recently, Genius raised the issue again and provided a few examples. All of those examples were also available on many other lyric sites and services, raising the possibility that our team unknowingly sourced Genius lyrics from another location. As a result, LyricFind offered to remove any lyrics Genius felt had originated from them, even though we did not source them from Genius’ site. Genius declined to respond to that offer. Despite that, our team is currently investigating the content in our database and removing any lyrics that seem to have originated from Genius.”
Sounds like everyone and their mother is scraping stuff off Genius, not just Google; they went after Google specifically because they knew they couldn't just disappear and they had the financial means to pay for compensation, unlike the thousands of crappy lyrics websites.
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.
Last I checked, ignorance wasn't usually a defense but I'm not a lawyer. I just know not to pretend the Keurig I bought off the back of a truck was a good deal for everyone involved.
But physical analogies to IP fall apart quickly so I'm not going to encourage people to read into that too deeply
If that flies, it's a great tactic. You can't just use the data from site A, so you build anonymous sites B, C and D who use the data from site A, and use the data from those sites instead. "We didn't source from A".
Google has a history of scraping content that they want, their business is built on the back of scraping other peoples content. The story I read just recently of what happened to Celebrity Net Worth was an interesting read where Google asked for an API, they refused and Google just scraped the content anyway. There was no lawsuit, but CNW put up fake content and sure enough, it made its way to Google.
It is all ironic given how aggressive Google are in blocking any attempts to scrape its content.
I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that only the copyright holder can sue for copyright infringement. I am pretty certain Genius does not hold the copyright to those lyrics. It's odd Genius brought this case at all. This is briefly noted at the end of the original article, but it seems like the whole point. Did I miss something?
From genius.com: "Genius Media Group, Inc. (GMG) is fully licensed to display lyrics across all of its properties. In 2013, GMG entered into licenses with every major music publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing, EMI Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group, and Warner/Chappell Music. In addition, GMG developed a form license with the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) which today covers more than 96% of the independent publisher market."
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 are going to have a problem with standing for the exact reason you suggest. This case was one company who was scraping other people’s copyrighted works suing another company for doing the same.
That's correct however the publishing company that administers an artists royalties is generally the one to bring the suit. This is the same type of royalty as sheet music.
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]
Genius claims that Google’s actions caused a decline in traffic to its site. The lawsuit was probably a way to assuage nervous investors (who have poured >70M into the company)
I think it's important to point out that when you license lyrics, you don't actually get the lyrics. I know, sounds ridiculous. You'll get the license to display them, and when you ask the rightsholders of these lyrics (the publishers) for the actual lyrics they'll tell you "oh, we don't have the actual text, just the rights. You need to find the text somewhere else."
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 Google can scrape my site, am I allowed to scrape Google results? Could I create a Google clone by scraping?
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.
I wonder if it's even possible to fix Google search in the framework of a for-profit company. It seems like the trajectory of any ad-supported service eventually lands it in a "don't let the user out no matter the cost" phase. Perhaps such a service really does need to operate as a non-profit foundation of some sorts.
There 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.
What does a GPT-3 future look like? If I ask it to fill in lyrics for a song or facts about companies and this comes from the knowledge it gained by “reading” a vast corpus, how is this different than a person reading the Genius site, memorizing the song, and the transcribing the lyrics?
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.
Techcrunch article left too many questions for me so I looked up and found https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius-law... which seems to be a much more detailed and nuanced explanation of what is going on here, with backgrounds on who, what, etc.
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 ?
I can't really understand why Genius cares. If Google didn't scrape from them they could scrape from one of dozens of other lyrics sites with pretty much the same results.
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.
> Defendants made unauthorized reproductions of Plaintiff’s lyric transcriptions and profited off of those unauthorized reproductions, which is behavior that falls under federal copyright law.
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.
This all seems odd to me. Publishing song lyrics on the Internet seems like a small feature of a search engine and not an entire company with millions of dollars invested.
[+] [-] sgentle|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] laughinghan|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] dastx|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Polylactic_acid|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gnicholas|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] learnstats2|5 years ago|reply
The fact that Genius collated those works is meaningful work in its own right.
[+] [-] Wandfarbe|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jonas21|5 years ago|reply
https://imgur.com/IGs0sg7
[+] [-] JMTQp8lwXL|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CydeWeys|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] DoubleGlazing|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] akersten|5 years ago|reply
[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.)
[+] [-] dehrmann|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mikejb|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sien|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lefrenchy|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] loa_in_|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zozbot234|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] HJain13|5 years ago|reply
https://searchengineland.com/google-to-add-attribution-to-li...
The dismissal seems logical to me
[+] [-] Cthulhu_|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] qppo|5 years ago|reply
But physical analogies to IP fall apart quickly so I'm not going to encourage people to read into that too deeply
[+] [-] luckylion|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DigitalSea|5 years ago|reply
It is all ironic given how aggressive Google are in blocking any attempts to scrape its content.
[+] [-] anonytrary|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Avamander|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] smabie|5 years ago|reply
It's just the war that is being fought, not some sort of hypocrisy or irony.
[+] [-] dwheeler|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 1vuio0pswjnm7|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] luma|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] noncoml|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] SpaceRaccoon|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bogomipz|5 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] TAForObvReasons|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] earthnail|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] abdulhaq|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kyle_morris_|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] emptyparadise|5 years ago|reply
There 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.
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
8 months ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21781668
and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21700866
June 2019: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194952
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20201139
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20204625
[+] [-] cromwellian|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] drivebycomment|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ikeboy|5 years ago|reply
>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.
[+] [-] cjsawyer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greggman3|5 years ago|reply
It perfectly fits their mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".
[+] [-] rndmze|5 years ago|reply
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 ?
[+] [-] Digit-Al|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] alextheparrot|5 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Lammy|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963365
https://searchengineland.com/google-has-officially-penalized...
Pretty funny that Google depends on them for content now.
[+] [-] paul_f|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jimmy2020|5 years ago|reply