There were years and years with lyrics sites being sued out of existence, blocked, moved from weird overseas host to weird overseas host, etc.. Also tablature sites.
Rap Genius was a massively financed Big Deal at the time (which seems unimaginable because it is so dumb, but all of the newspapers wanted to license their "technology.") They dealt with record companies and the RIAA directly, iirc. Google is google, and piggybacks off that. And the entire conflict became frozen after that, even through I'm sure that if you put up a lyrics site, you'd quickly get any number of cease and desists.
> Is it actually copyright infringement to state the lyrics of a song, though? How has Google / Genius etc gotten away with it for years if that were the case?
This shouldn't be treated like a rhetorical question that you assume google has the answer to, and just glide past. Copyright around song lyrics has a very rich, very recorded history.
Rap Genius was a massively financed Big Deal at the time (which seems unimaginable because it is so dumb, but all of the newspapers wanted to license their "technology.") They dealt with record companies and the RIAA directly, iirc. Google is google, and piggybacks off that. And the entire conflict became frozen after that, even through I'm sure that if you put up a lyrics site, you'd quickly get any number of cease and desists.
> Is it actually copyright infringement to state the lyrics of a song, though? How has Google / Genius etc gotten away with it for years if that were the case?
This shouldn't be treated like a rhetorical question that you assume google has the answer to, and just glide past. Copyright around song lyrics has a very rich, very recorded history.