
Court dismisses Genius lawsuit over lyrics-scraping by Google - fortran77
https://techcrunch.com/2020/08/11/court-dismisses-genius-lawsuit-over-lyrics-scraping-by-google/
======
sgentle
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.

~~~
Polylactic_acid
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.

~~~
laughinghan
No, in the US you cannot copyright facts, only expression. So you have control
over word-for-word copies of your article about a bird; but you have no
control over dissemination of the facts you discovered about the bird. SCOTUS
decided this in 1991, Feist v. Rural:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co).

You might be thinking of sui generis database rights, which DOES cover
collections of facts. The EU, Russia, and Brazil recognize this right, but the
US doesn't:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right#United_States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right#United_States)

~~~
nl
The US does recognise compilations as copyrightable though (but there must be
decisions made about what to include).

See
[https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/images/6/6f/Protection_of_C...](https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/images/6/6f/Protection_of_Collaborative_Online_Maps_under_US_Copyright_Law.pdf)

~~~
aspenmayer
It could be a system, oracle, or network, which computes weights or votes,
just as soon as it could be an individual or group casting ballots or
deliberating. The deciding is key, perhaps not who decides. Some aspects of
law are slippery like that though, where one set of rules applies to human
agents, and a different, perhaps mutually exclusive set, apply to everything
else.

For example, horse drawn carriages have the right of way even over
pedestrians, because you’re pulling weight, or more accurately, a beast of
burden is pulling the weight. It’s a living thing too, and it can’t stop on a
dime when it’s got a load. It makes sense when you know the context and
framing for why the law is so written today.

I’m sure there are similar examples in others contexts. Court cases and judges
look at the law like we do whitepapers. Some docs are better than others, and
there are some devs, and other judges’ toes you’d be hesitant to tread on,
especially if you have a habit of doing that kind of thing.

------
jonas21
Regardless of what you think about the lawsuit, you have to give them credit
for their watermarking method:

[https://imgur.com/IGs0sg7](https://imgur.com/IGs0sg7)

~~~
JMTQp8lwXL
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.

~~~
jdub
The semantic difference would be important in a song like Baby Got Back by Sir
Mix-a-lot, which includes both speech quotes and imperial measurements.

~~~
robin_reala
Imperial measurements should use the prime symbol and not straight quotes:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_%28symbol%29#Designation...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_%28symbol%29#Designation_of_units)

~~~
edflsafoiewq
For lyrics, you should just transcribe the pronunciation, eg "six foot two".

~~~
nxpnsv
I for one would impose metric... it may be harder to rap, but true talent
steps up to a challenge...

~~~
BuildTheRobots
"But I would walk 804 kilometres, And I would walk 804 more, Just to be the
man who walks a 1,608 kilometres, To fall down at your door..."

~~~
nxpnsv
It's so catchy! Perhaps: "16093.44 meters high" by "0.2286 meter nails"...

------
HJain13
> 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.”

[https://searchengineland.com/google-to-add-attribution-to-
li...](https://searchengineland.com/google-to-add-attribution-to-licensed-
lyrics-providers-318402)

The dismissal seems logical to me

~~~
Cthulhu_
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.

~~~
shadowgovt
But it sounds like the issue is that Google really wasn't using Genius's data
directly. The problem is that Google is sourcing from "The Internet," and
everybody and their grandmother is 'stealing' from Genius.

Here's an interesting question: if Genius closed up shop tomorrow, how long
would it take Google to become the primary source of song lyrics online (by
rebuilding Genius's dataset from general Internet harvesting)?

------
DigitalSea
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.

~~~
anonytrary
Probably a silly question, but why not just use robots.txt? That was designed
for preventing exactly this.

~~~
dewey
Not due to robots.txt but you can see what happens to genius formerly
rapgenius when they get removed from the index:

[https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-
genius/](https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/)

~~~
encom
Wear a condom before clicking techcrunch.com links:

[https://archive.ph/9eUkv](https://archive.ph/9eUkv)

~~~
icebraining
To be fair to TC, if you disable JavaScript you get a pretty good experience -
just the full article, legible. Not like those sites that require JS to load
the text and/or images.

~~~
wizzwizz4
But you need JavaScript to get past the "we value your privacy, so give us
permission to sell it" banner.

------
dwheeler
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?

~~~
TAForObvReasons
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)

~~~
echelon
$70M for lyrics not even owned seems absurd.

Still, Google is being very fucking evil here. It's as if they stole that $70M
for themselves.

~~~
isoskeles
> very fucking evil

Your abuse of words is a heinous crime against humanity.

------
earthnail
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.

~~~
abdulhaq
It's for this sort of thing that Google had to get rid of their "do no evil"
spiel.

------
kyle_morris_
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.

~~~
gscott
Google was pretty unhappy with Bing for doing just that.

[https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-
google/](https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/)

~~~
galkk
The amount of Google captchas that you needeed to solve when searching on
Google from Microsoft office made me think that it was some kind of
psychological warfare.

~~~
jtxx
tbh sounds petty enough to be true

------
emptyparadise
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.

~~~
dannyw
The other option would be strong antitrust enforcement; allowing competitors
to emerge and compete with incumbents.

~~~
icebraining
How would that work? What should an antitrust order demand Google to do in
order to allow competitors to emerge?

~~~
therealdrag0
Well in this case, not steal their content. It's wrong for Google to siphon
other businesses work for their own profit.

Google shouldn't steal Genius or Yelp content. Facebook shouldn't steal
YouTuber's content, etc. etc.

It's not hard to see how if you were in the little guys shoes you'd feel
screwed over. We need to innovate our laws to reflect that.

~~~
icebraining
It's not Genius' content. It's the musicians', who actually wrote the lyrics.
If it _was_ their content, they could sue for copyright infringement. Google
has been sued on those grounds, and forced to change how they do their
business (e.g. provide ContentID to handle copyright infringement on YouTube).

But I suppose we could say "don't scrape and present content outside of a
regular search result". But then again, Google claims they haven't done so -
that they got those lyrics from LyricFind, a lyric licensing platform - and
Genius didn't present any evidence that this wasn't the case. So I'm not clear
on how could any laws help here.

Finally, the question was not about Genius, it was about allowing competitors
to _Google_ to emerge. I don't see how would this help.

------
dang
The rest of the stack:

8 months ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21781668](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21781668)

and
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21700866](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21700866)

June 2019:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194952](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194952)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20201139](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20201139)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20204625](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20204625)

------
cromwellian
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.

------
drivebycomment
Techcrunch article left too many questions for me so I looked up and found
[https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius-
law...](https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/genius-lawsuit-
google-922666/) which seems to be a much more detailed and nuanced explanation
of what is going on here, with backgrounds on who, what, etc.

------
ikeboy
>A state court

>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.

~~~
gnicholas
This was confusing to me as well. I saw EDNY and was confused about why it was
booted due to federal preemption. Considering the importance of this
procedural aspect, it seems like a pretty big deal to get this wrong.

The real story here is left completely untold: why didn't they bring a
copyright claim? Could they bring a copyright claim in the future? Could one
of the owners of the copyright bring a claim? These are the questions that
matter.

~~~
qtplatypus
They couldn’t bring a copyright claim because they don’t own an exclusive
license.

------
cjsawyer
What will google steal when all the other websites are dead?

~~~
toohotatopic
Nothing, because then you are on google sites all the time and google gets all
the ad dollars.

For some reasons, google wants to become AOoL, introducing the A with their
AMP service (or with Applied Semantics).

This rises the question: Will content owners create their own content network?
If Google steals your content on the internet, why put your content on the
internet? Why not have an app that delivers content to paying customers? Now
each content provider tries this on his own with his own app. why not combine
the efforts and just offer a browser for their closed network or embrace the
Brave browser? If all content producers pull this off together, the audience
will be there.

Facebook could offer a Facebook content network on their own because they
already have the audience, and Genius and all those Recipe sites could publish
their content in a secure way. Maybe Instagram with its text pictures is
already the predecessor.

It seems like Google was taken over by Applied Semantics in the same way that
Boeing was taken over by McDonnell Douglas because in the long run, nobody
offers up his content for search if it is ripped off.

------
greggman3
Thank goodness. I'm happy that google gives me lyrics and I don't have to go
an add covered lyrics site.

It perfectly fits their mission "to organize the world's information and make
it universally accessible and useful".

~~~
pottertheotter
I enjoy using Genius. People, including the artists, leave commentary on
lyrics that give me a deeper understanding of the lyrics.

~~~
brokenmachine
I enjoy Genius too.

Genius with it's annotations is much more interesting than just the lyrics in
plain text.

Also Google makes you click the big down arrow before showing the complete
lyrics, which makes me irrationally annoyed.

------
rndmze
Interesting to see the roles reversed.

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
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.

------
alextheparrot
> 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.

~~~
bawolff
Is the transcription actually copyrightable? Just because genius wants it to
be doesn't make it true.

Compare to the whole word perfect clip art lawsuit

~~~
alextheparrot
I think that’s their case to make, but from what I could find the answer seems
to be probably not.

Derivative works are copyrightable (Translations, adapting a book to a movie),
but it might be hard to argue an exact copy of the song lyrics are
“derivative” as they aren’t an original creation, but simply a subset of the
old work.

~~~
bawolff
See also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bridgeman_Art_Library_v._Corel_Corp).

------
Lammy
Remember when Google punished Genius (then known as Rap Genius) by removing
them from search results entirely?

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963365](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6963365)

[https://searchengineland.com/google-has-officially-
penalized...](https://searchengineland.com/google-has-officially-penalized-
rap-genius-for-link-schemes-180777)

Pretty funny that Google depends on them for content now.

------
paul_f
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.

------
jimmy2020
Genius does not hold lyrics copyright but the site business model depends on
traffic generated by lyrics which is in this case hijacked by Google.

~~~
AgloeDreams
They license lyrics however and, critically, often times lyrics and their
copyright are not a package deal. many songs don't have lyrics provided from
the publisher. Genius allows users and artists to upload the lyrics. Google
has the copyright but blatantly steals the content. This obviously is not
protected in US law but it is elsewhere (see news sites and such in some
countries requiring google to pay). Google then uses their search results to
leverage their position.

------
praveen9920
Just a thought experiment: If Google releases paid version of search where it
won't show ads, personalize based on your click-through history and do not
copy content from source for presentation, won't share your data with anyone,
would you opt for it?

Root cause of most of the issues seem to be monetization model of Google where
they are optimising people to stay within their ecosystem.

~~~
danShumway
It's an interesting question. I don't trust Google, and a fast pivot to
another product/offering wouldn't change that overnight, so I would lean
towards no.

I paid for Youtube Red, even though I never signed into the service on Youtube
and even though I already got all of the Youtube-specific benefit in the form
of adblocking and NewPipe. I did that purely to try and signal to Google, "I
will pay for content, I want you to have revenue sources outside advertising."

But ultimately Youtube Red seems to have been a failure, my signal hasn't
changed the course of the company, and the parts of Youtube Red I did get
value from (say, Music) have gotten noticeably worse over the years. I'm
planning to drop my subscription in September. I think it would be tough for
me to buy into another product like that from Google, my experience trying to
buy products from Google to get around advertising/tracking has been both a
practical and moral failure. Certainly I won't sign up for a paid GSuite
account now.

But I do already pay for Email (Fastmail), bookmarking (Wallabag), and a few
other "free" internet services and apps today. So I might pay for search if a
company like DuckDuckGo offered it instead of Google. But I would need to see
what their offer actually was.

I mean, heck, I'd be giving recurring donations to DuckDuckGo today if they
accepted them, they're on my list of companies I want to exist. So paying 5$ a
month for a "premium" search experience wouldn't really be that different,
even if I never signed into it.

~~~
erklik
> I mean, heck, I'd be giving recurring donations to DuckDuckGo today if they
> accepted them, they're on my list of companies I want to exist. So paying 5$
> a month for a "premium" search experience wouldn't really be that different,
> even if I never signed into it.

[https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/company/do...](https://help.duckduckgo.com/duckduckgo-help-
pages/company/donations/)

They seem to want you to enable their ads. Is that something you would ever
do?

~~~
danShumway
Unfortunately no.

Different people have different reasons for disabling ads. Some people only
care about egregious ads and privacy violations, that's fine.

I am against ads in general, I noticed a sharp quality of life increase when I
started blocking ads universally everywhere I could, regardless of whether or
not I was on the web. That's a longer conversation, I'm not going to get into
it now. I respect that other people have different opinions, but I also feel
reasonably strongly about my own.

I do spread DuckDuckGo to other people, but I also spread uBlock Origin, so
I'm not sure I'm a net positive there either. :)

It's again, an interesting question. I've been pushing pretty hard in my
personal life to financially support Open Source software that I use, projects
that I really care about. DuckDuckGo is one of the few companies that I
_really_ like that I haven't ever really supported in any tangible way.

I do feel guilty about that, but not guilty enough to allow myself to be
turned into a product. There is likely no company where I would ever feel
guilty enough to turn on ads. But given that DuckDuckGo isn't going to allow
donations any time soon, I could see a lightweight 'premium' DuckDuckGo
product effectively being a way for me to just give them money without it
feeling to them like it's a donation.

Actually, what I should do is to look into some of their merch and see what
they offer and if they actually make a profit on it. I _thought_ at one point
DuckDuckGo sold shirts or something, but I don't know if they still do. Again
though, this all kind of ends up being a messy proxy for donations. I'm not
super-jazzed about walking around as a living billboard either, even for a
company I like.

------
look_lookatme
Let's not forget that at one point Genius launched a product that would scrape
your site, re-host it, then overlay comments on it -- 100% without your
control.

They have played the game and lost and now they are desperate. They should
have got some adults in the room before it was too late.

~~~
criddell
What would be different today if on day one they had all the necessary
licenses in place?

------
hahla
Curious if anyone can shed some light on what this would mean for the
“featured snippet” feature of search results. Google has been scraping web
pages, and showing answers to users queries using unique content directly on
the search results page.

------
michaelcampbell
Well, as they say in TV shows, there's the truth, the law, and what you can
prove. (And I guess taking that tack, what's fair.) The content of the article
is about one of those things, but the court case was about another.

------
kobayashimaru
Turning information into knowledge is impossible without humans and thus would
invalidate Google's business model if it had in any way to pay for it. Looking
with fresh eyes you could say Google is the biggest leech ever created.

------
wodenokoto
Does this mean that scraping is allowed, regardless of TOC as long as you
don’t distribute copyrighted materials?

Basically it sounds like the court said “scraping data against TOC and
publishing scraped data at best amounts to a copyright violation”

~~~
dodobirdlord
I think that was the decision of the LinkedIn scraping case about a year ago.
It held that you can't have a page that is accessible to the public but not to
your competitor's scrapers.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn)

------
larrik
Is this court arguing that it's legal to scrape a website regardless of theirs
ToS? That copyright is the only law that matters on the web for this sort of
thing?

~~~
Aachen
From my 5-minutes-reading-the-comments understanding, this is fairly specific
to lyrics because they're not your invention, even if there was work involved
in transcribing them. I don't think this applies to scraping different kinds
of content. For example, a map is similar but different: no creativity
involved (just map what's there) but lots of work. Yet that falls under sui
generis database rights (which Wikipedia says the USA doesn't have, but
Wikipedia also says they signed a treaty and so they have it... It's
complicated) and Google can totally sue me if I copy their map data into
OpenStreetMap. (Yet we can't sue them if they use our open data as a distinct
but invisible/unlabeled layer.)

------
weisbaum
Google has been doing this for a long time.

Rich snippets are all stolen pageviews. To make matters worse, they now don't
let the site which is featured in the snippet have a secondary ranking further
down the page.

They keep adding schema, which SEOs eat up because it provides a secondary
level of content optimization but it's not as effective as it used to be for
increasing CTR on your serp results.

The one positive of this is I no longer have to goto recipe sites which
overload my screen with ads and put the ingredients 50% down the page. Google
just scrapes the content and displays it in the snippet box.

------
bobcostas55
Why not write some original lyrics that Genius would own the copyright to,
wait for google to scrape them, and then sue over that?

------
1f60c
Serious question: why is Google allowed to scrape websites with impunity, but
other, smaller businesses and individuals aren’t?

~~~
AgloeDreams
If you don't want to be scraped, just say so in your Robots.txt!'

It's leverage to force companies into picking being stolen from or being never
seen.

------
tareqak
Is it not possible for a copyright holder to give the power to sue on their
behalf to a licensee?

------
nutanc
So if I scrape Google search page and remove the ads and show it on my page,
that's ok now?

------
exogeny
Remember when Horowitz gave this company $10 million just because he liked rap
music? Good times.

~~~
AgloeDreams
In fairness, their product is fantastic.

------
60secz
When your "moat" is a non-exclusive license, and your competition is in
FAANG...

------
remote_phone
It’s not just copyright. Because of Google’s monopoly what they are doing is
stealing a revenue stream from Genius. This is another case of Google
leveraging their search monopoly.

They need to be declared a monopoly and put on a very short leash here. I hope
something comes of the hearings in Washington late last month.

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flexie
Does the US not have anything like database rights for collections of data?
What about unfair business practices?

At the end of the day, Genius has probably spent thousands of man years
collecting the lyrics and Google free rides on that getting it all in seconds.

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dubb20
what about OHHLA.com, which genius scraped ?

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dannyw
Did Genius hire someone overtly ambitious or simply incompetent lawyers?

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wnevets
Didn't genius get caught using black-hat seo manipulation?

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polyomino
They pop champagne in Mountain View every night.

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greggman3
To me this is as simple as some people made an easily copied site that
provides very little value (there's 50+ lyrics sites). Google, rightly, adds
lyrics results to search. It's part of their mission.

Sucks to be Genius but if they want people to visit they need to provide
something more than "facts".

As for the idea that Google scraped the site, as pointed out elsewhere, they
didn't, their contractors may have, the contractor pointed out to Genius that
the same results Genius was complaining about were on many other sites (maybe
those sites copied from Genius as well). The contractor offer to remove many
copies anyway, Genius didn't respond.

Further, this is exactly the kind of thing that is probably not too far from
automating via speech recognition and/or ad partnering. If it was me, I'd
consider trying to partner with the music companies, send us the lyrics and
we'll link to your site/band/videos...

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AlexandrB
> To me this is as simple as some people made an easily copied site that
> provides very little value (there's 50+ lyrics sites).

Spoken like someone who's never looked up lyrics online before. Genius is to
lyrics what Stack Overflow is to programming questions. In both cases there
were/are other sites doing the same thing, but they are ad-riddled,
inaccurate, incomplete, and sometimes paywalled.

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tantalor
The 285th Rule of the Ferengi Rules of Acquisition states that "No good deed
ever goes unpunished."

