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Google Allegedly Caught Stealing Song Lyrics … Because of Punctuation

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

upstart writes for SoyCow1944:

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, @10:42PM (1 child)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 17 2019, @10:42PM (#856825)

    No, and they don't need to. They may or may not have licensing deals with the MAFIAA that covers the actual lyric content, but the aggregation, rendering and typesetting can be independently copyrighted by Genius.

    Some civilized parts of the world also have the more generic database copyright [wikipedia.org] -- any collection of publicly-available information may be copyrighted, even if the material itself cannot:

    The TRIPS Agreement requires that copyright protection extends to databases and other compilations if they constitute intellectual creation by virtue of the selection or arrangement of their contents, even if some or all of the contents do not themselves constitute materials protected by copyright

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @02:47AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 18 2019, @02:47AM (#856877)

    But as far as I can see nobody is accusing Google of copying the "selection or arrangements of [the database] contents".

    And you wouldn't need hidden watermarks to determine that.