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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) by urza9814 on Tuesday June 18 2019, @01:32PM

    by urza9814 (3954) on Tuesday June 18 2019, @01:32PM (#856967) Journal

    Copyright is not the only issue here. Genius has a 'non-commercial use only' clause in their Terms of Service, meaning that this would still be a contract violation even if there's no copyright interest.

    Not sure if such clauses have ever been tested in court, but between the Creative Commons -NC licenses and all the various "community edition" projects, it's going to be a pretty big problem for a LOT of people and organizations if that is deemed unenforceable.

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