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A comment on Autopsy of a failed side project.

Re:Autopsy of a failed side project by ashray on Monday October 07, 2013 @06:53AM (#6507412)
Sad to see this site go. Looked like a great project. So just out of pure curiosity, where would someone go to legally acquire lyrics for a particular song ? (sorry to say this but this sounds absolutely retarded to me.. what exactly are you damaging by publishing lyrics to songs ? I don't see the copyright argument at all.. it's not like someone will not buy a song because they can access the lyrics for free online ?)
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Re:Autopsy of a failed side project by subimage on Monday October 07, 2013 @01:24PM (#6509726)
We didn't see a problem with it (and neither did our lawyers) until that $6.6M judgement played out against another lyric site with similar "user contributed" content.

There are a couple of routes to go legal - one being Musixmatch, which charges at minimum $20k per year for a blanket license.

An email straight from them:

"We offer data licensing packages, through our scalable Lyrics API, that are customized to meet your needs with annual fees ranging from USD $20,000 to higher depending on the audience for the data and which data are being licensed. We are not able to offer any sort of data license for less than USD $20,000."

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Re:Autopsy of a failed side project by smackfu on Monday October 07, 2013 @11:46AM (#6508971)
Lyrics sites have been in the copyright crosshairs for 15 years now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Lyrics_Server

It's not super clear to me how someone like Rap Genius is getting around this. Their policy page says they respect DMCA requests, but if they are unlicensed, they would get a DMCA request for every single page on their site. So my guess is some kind of blanket license to someone like the Harry Fox Agency. They have the money for it.

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Re:Autopsy of a failed side project by GotAnyMegadeth on Monday October 07, 2013 @07:54AM (#6507588)
Perhaps the Record Labels believe that a differentiator between buying a CD and downloading for free is the lyrics book that comes with (most) CDs.
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