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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: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:35AM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday June 18 2019, @11:35AM (#856936) Journal
    Mens rea and the two crimes aren't equivalent. On the first, any defendant whether a corporation or an individual can use the defense that they didn't know that a crime was committed. You thought that the criminal was selling a TV they no longer use, not something stolen from a house.

    On the second, I still don't buy that plagiarism is equivalent to stealing physical property. And yes, I saw those video clips that equate copying movies to breaking a window of a car and stealing stuff.
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