Court dismisses Genius lawsuit over lyrics-scraping by Google - Hackdot

Re:Court dismisses Genius lawsuit over lyrics-scraping by Go... by gnicholas on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @04:05AM (#24129626)

> 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.

Apparently they license the lyrics now:

> Genius isn’t the copyright holder for these lyrics, it just licenses them itself.

It's not a case of someone copying without permission and then suing another person who copied them. It's a valid licensee suing someone who is copying them.

Imagine if a McDonald's franchisee sued someone running a rogue/unlicensed McDonald's around the corner. Would we have no sympathy for them also?

Legally speaking, it appears the right to sue requires at least some exclusive copyright rights, [1] which Genius surely didn't have (and a McDonald's franchisee also would not have). This is presumably why they didn't bring a copyright suit.

https://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=7d4ea127-0fb0...

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Re:Court dismisses Genius lawsuit over lyrics-scraping by Go... by icebraining on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @04:34AM (#24129774)

Google says they also license: https://blog.google/products/search/how-we-help-you-find-lyr...

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Re:Court dismisses Genius lawsuit over lyrics-scraping by Go... by gnicholas on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @04:41AM (#24129807)

True, though that blog post also says "We do not crawl or scrape websites to source these lyrics.", which was definitely not true (though may be now).

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Re:Court dismisses Genius lawsuit over lyrics-scraping by Go... by alwaysdoit on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @02:16PM (#24135023)

Google licenses the lyrics through a third party, LyricFind, which in turn hired people to transcribe them. In a small percentage of cases, those transcribers did not do their own work and instead copied lyrics from Genius.

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Re:Court dismisses Genius lawsuit over lyrics-scraping by Go... by dontblink on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @10:41AM (#24132477)

I think it was true then. I believe their claim was usage via third party?

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