Exactly. This should definitely be grounds for allowing copying google maps data as long as you render it in your own style. The usual trick here is trap data where map makers insert fake data to catch copies but thats exactly what happened here with the ' in the lyrics.

If the actual data isn't copyrightable, yet the 'fake/trap data' is, then presumably when one copies the map, a court will decide that the magnitude of the copying is very small - only a single apostrophe was copied - and therefore the damages negligible.

If fake data is hidden amongst real data, wouldn't there also be the argument that the copier was unaware that they were copying a creative work rather than pure facts?

Fred Saberhagen made this a plot point in one of his Berserker stories. Going by my highly suspect memory...

A damaged Berserker captures an atlas showing an occupied system nearby, and heads there with its last reserves of power to destroy the system.

The human who didn't stop the Berserker is charged with a crime against sentience, but is acquitted when he reveals the secret: The occupied system was a fake, in the tradition of cartographers going back to the Middle Ages on Sol.

Just add some small, inconsequential error to all positional data.

Does this mean Genius can add a few non-breaking spaces to the lyrics, with a couple of odd unicode characters that look like periods and commas.

I guess at some point it’d end up looking like a ReCaptcha and there’s enough of those already ...

Thats exactly what they did with commas. Didn't help them.

Because you are allowed to (I presume) copy the raw data (gps coordinates of roads, buildings, etc.) But you don’t have access to it, instead you only see their map design.

The equivalent would be to copy an existing map, not to create a map based on your observations of the world.

But what google did here was not listening to every song and writing down the lyrics. They just copied the text off another website.

The land is there. Depicting it is the result of Google's work. You went over, or used a satellite photo with the appropriate licensing and YOU painted (created) the map.

Lyrics are not just found in the wild (like a mountain or a street is). Someone thought of them, wrote them down, so it was their creation. It is like listening to me reciting a poem, write it down, and sell the book.

This is a classic example of the map not being the teritory that I think gets the point across: "Ceci n'est pas une pipe"

I don't know about copyrights for maps, but your argument is not good: You can't copyright a flower, but take a picture of that flower and the rights to the picture belong to you. Google is not preventing others from collecting mapping data, but they prevent them from copying the data Google has collected.