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posted by chromas on Monday June 17 2019, @07:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the great-artists-steal dept.

Google Allegedly Caught Stealing Song Lyrics ... Because of Punctuation

Lyrics site Genius has reported dropping traffic since Google introduced its information panel feature for song words in 2014. However, the Wall Street Journal (via The Verge) has today reported that Genius is accusing Google of not only stealing its market share but directly copying content from its pages.

[...] The evidence Genius gives to show that Google is scraping its lyrics is in the form of apostrophes. In 2016 it introduced a system of alternating apostrophes (‘, or U+0027 in Unicode, the dominant form of text processing on the Internet ) with single quotation marks (’, or U+2019). Every song features the same sequence of swapping between the two subtly different marks, which spells out ‘red handed’ when you translate it into Morse code.

[...] Google said in a statement to the WSJ that it didn’t make the lyrics panels itself, but rather licensed the content from other companies, such as LyricFind, who it partnered with in 2016. LyricFind also claims not to have stolen content from Genius, instead using its own team to source song lyrics.


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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @09:17PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @09:17PM (#856797)

    Indeed, unless Genius has a copyright interest in the lyrics themselves it seems unlikely they are entitled to any damages under the law, which means they have no case. Copyright has a creative component: while the bar is pretty low, writing down the words from an existing song does not, in general, produce a new copyright interest because no creativity is involved in this process.

    Using different unicode code points with similar presentation to identify the source of the text, neat as it may be, is unlikely to meet the creative threshold required for copyright protection on its own.

    Only the actual copyright holders for the lyrics involved have standing to bring an infringement case against Google. That may or may not be Genius, details matter...

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  • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @10:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @10:32PM (#856820)

    i think you're subtly yet dangerously wrong here as, in the us at least, you can publish public domain works and get copyright on the page-headers and footers -- both far less creative than the morse-code message woven into the works that found their way into the song-panels.

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:41AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:41AM (#856937) Journal
    But that is the thing. The bar is pretty low. I think Genius has it right. It's one thing for a competitor to write down those lyrics as well and provide the exact same service. But to copy/paste Genius's work directly is a copyright violation even if the work supposedly is very trivial. As an aside, if the work truly is trivial, then why would anyone bother to do that?

    Using different unicode code points with similar presentation to identify the source of the text, neat as it may be, is unlikely to meet the creative threshold required for copyright protection on its own.

    It doesn't need to be. The text itself is the copyrighted material. The unicode trick is to spot those who merely plagiarized Genius's efforts, not to establish copyright.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by urza9814 on Tuesday June 18 2019, @01:28PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday June 18 2019, @01:28PM (#856965) Journal

    It's not a verbatim transcription, particularly with Genius. Firstly they have pretty strict guidelines about formatting and punctuation and everything in order to keep a uniform appearance across their website (to the point that their website has dozens, possibly hundreds, of pages explaining proper style and formatting). Apparently that level of appearance is more important to them than raw accuracy, so it's definitely more than just a flat transcription of the song lyrics.

    They also have exclusivity agreements with some artists -- if you read TFA, that's how they found the problem in the first place. An artist had agreed to only post their lyrics on Genius, then the exact same lyrics with the exact same formatting showed up on Google a few days later. That's a bit different than a transcription created by a fan. The artist surely has copyright over those lyrics, and they authorized Genius to publish it but not Google.

    There's also a lot more than the raw lyric transcription on Genius, although I can't really tell how much of that may have been copied. From simple metadata mentioning which member sang/wrote particular parts, to annotations explaining the precise meaning of certain phrases. I'd assume the former was likely included in the copies and the latter was not, but I don't see any details to see how much of a factor that could be.

    Of course, none of this may actually matter, as it's likely a contract issue rather than a copyright issue. According to the Genius website, they have negotiated a license with most major record labels in order to have permission to display those lyrics. So they seem to acknowledge that they do not own the text itself. However, this kind of use does very clearly violate their Terms of Service:

    Commercial Use: Unless otherwise expressly authorized herein or by Genius' express written consent, you agree not to display, distribute, license, perform, publish, reproduce, duplicate, copy, create derivative works from, modify, sell, resell, exploit, transfer or transmit for any commercial purposes, any portion of the Service, use of the Service, or access to the Service. The Service is for your personal use and may not be used for direct commercial endeavors without the express written consent of Genius.

    So this appears to be very solid evidence that Google, or one of Google's contractors, violated those terms. Now we get to see if that's actually enforceable. (And if it's not, then that would seem to invalidate all of the Creative Commons -NC licenses, along with the licenses for most "community edition" projects...if 'noncommercial use' is not an enforceable term, that's going to cause a lot of problems for a lot of people)