Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M

Re:Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M by skizm on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:21AM (#28551410)

Didn't they get blacklisted from Google results for some sort of dark / spammy SEO scheme a while back? I assumed that was the death blow for these guys. Or did they somehow workout a deal that let them come back? I stopped keeping track.

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Re:Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M by milkthefat on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:25AM (#28551467)

I believe they did an encoding(Morse code or something) in the lyrics to prove google was using them verbatim.

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Re:Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M by ocdtrekkie on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:26AM (#28551473)

There was also the whole thing where Google stole all their lyrics data to power Knowledge Graph without paying them. Hard to sustain a business when goliath steals all your crud.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/genius-we-caught-google-red-hande...

Then they lost the lawsuit to some nonsensical bull because technically the lyrics of someone else's song can't be copyrighted by them. But nonetheless, all the work they did had been stolen by the search engine people would normally use to find them. Hard to survive as a business in that environment.

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Re:Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M by bobmaxup on Thursday September 16, 2021 @09:56AM (#28551836)

Didn't they get accused of doing the same thing?

https://www.vice.com/en/article/6wnp4r/an-annotated-intervie...

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Re:Genius Sells to Media Lab for $80M by klllllllz on Thursday September 16, 2021 @10:55AM (#28552624)

Yeah, I remembered this as well. I always thought this is why they changed from rapgenius to genius

https://techcrunch.com/2013/12/25/google-rap-genius/

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