> "Plaintiff's argument is, in essence, that it has created a derivative work of the original lyrics in applying its own labor and resources to transcribe the lyrics, and thus, retains some ownership over and has rights in the transcriptions distinct from the exclusive rights of the copyright owners... Plaintiff likely makes this argument without explicitly referring to the lyrics transcriptions as derivative works because the case law is clear that only the original copyright owner has exclusive rights to authorize derivative works,"
In short: when you don't have the rights you don't have standing to sue. But the real rights holders may well be able to sue both Genius and Google for copyright infringement.
Which they didn't. This is about Genius suing Google, and even if both of them are licensees that does not give either standing to sue the other. But it would give the original rights holders standing if the content were used outside of the license. Licensee != rights holder.
The part of your original comment I quoted was regarding the rights holder sueing them which came across as implying that the rights holder may have cause to do so. My response was attempting to point out that the rights holders don't appear to have cause since the lyrics are licensed.
Am I understanding this right? You invest a lot of work in creating a database, in this case transcribing lot of songs. Then someone comes along, vacuums your website, and there is nothing you can do? How odd.
Makes sense to me