“Over the last two years, we’ve shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius,” said Ben Gross, Genius’s chief strategy officer, in an email message. The company said it used a watermarking system in its lyrics that embedded patterns in the formatting of apostrophes. Genius said it found more than 100 examples of songs on Google that came from its site.
Starting around 2016, Genius said, the company made a subtle change to some of the songs on its website, alternating the lyrics’ apostrophes between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song.
When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words “Red Handed.”
This is such a clear and shut case – but I do wonder, can anyone other than the actual copyright holders even claim ownership over the lyrics? I mean, neither Genius nor Google wrote these lyrics in the first place, and yet, here they are fighting over ownership. Posting lyrics online may fall under fair use, but I doubt you’d be able to make a fair use appeal if you have a massive library of lyrics online, paid for through ads.
Thom Holwerda,
I agreed with you until I read the article, now it’s not so clear.
The known facts could change, but taking things at face value so far…Assuming what google said is true, they have licenses to publish the lyrics, and assuming the licenses are in fact authorized by the copyright holders , then what might have happened with the copying of lyrics could be attributable to employees at LyricFind taking shortcuts instead of transcribing the lyrics themselves. Ironically while copying genius’s lyrics may violate their terms of service, genius is not the copyright holder and therefor copying from them would not technically violate copyright law if it’s done with the legal copyright holder’s consent. Genius could sue LyricFind for breach of terms of service, but they have nothing on google since genius don’t hold the copyrights.
Additionally I don’t know how well the terms of service hold up in court if genius can’t go back and prove visitors actually agreed to it in the first place. The mere existence of a page on a website may not constitute a legal contract in the eyes of the law:
\https://www.businessinsider.com/zappos-terms-of-service-ruled-invalid-2012-10
So I don’t think this is such a “clear and shut case” after all, it’s actually a very interesting case and I hope you’ll follow up with updates 🙂
Maybe not open and shut, but this is more likely to get Genius shut down than to effect Google. While I’m not familiar with case laws on this, Google would most likely win as they got the proper licensing even if the lyrics were stolen from someone that didn’t. Genius on the other hand would lose severely if they got dragged into court as the record companies would argue that providing lyrics en masse for profit violates the fair use clause. Fair use definitely ends when you start using it for profit, and a judge and jury are going to agree on that.
dark2,
That’s if we take their claims at face value, but it’s possible that google was duped by LyricFind (to be clear, I’m not asserting anything one way or another, just pointing out that the information is still coming out).
Actually, the article suggests that genius does have license agreements with music publishers…
It’s completely possible that both google and genius are telling the truth and that both have license agreements with the copyright holders. If so, then there likely isn’t grounds for a copyright infringement case in either direction. Clearly genius still isn’t happy the lyrics were taken off it’s website, but suing over copyright infringement could be a dead end (depending on the facts).
Genius claims “reuse of Genius’s transcriptions breaks the Genius.com terms of service and violates antitrust law”. I already touched on TOS in my previous post. The antitrust angle is unlikely to succeed IMHO, but I actually do feel sorry for genius. Google is able to tweak a few knobs and make or break almost any business just by choosing where to send users to or even keeping them captive on google properties instead, which is what they’re doing here.. In this context, the copying of lyrixes is much more incidental, and the real damage has to do with google’s market control instead. I’d say this google monopoly strains most online publishers and ecommerce websites who are at google’s mercy since google determines what users find and controls most web traffic.
If Genius is purposefully embedding commas and apostrophes in weird places to identify lyrics they’ve published, it very well may be grounds for a copyright claim.
Look at it this way – I can publish any play by Shakespeare I wish to, because they are not under copyright. However, I can’t just reproduce somebody else’s publication of Romeo and Juliet.
Or, more closely related, while the information regarding street locations is public information and cannot be copyrighted, a map can be copyrighted, and map makers often put fake streets in their maps, or do purposeful minor mispellings in order to prove that something might be inappropriately reproduced. Embedding commas and apostrophes in weird ways as a watermark is exactly the same.
Drumhellar,
If it’s in the public domain, yes I think you can do exactly that. The publisher doesn’t own the copyright of the text even if you copied it from them. To get new copyright protection a publısher would need some kind of creative addıtıon to the original work. Whıle that’s something they could do, I don’t think that switching single quote marks is sufficient to qualıfy as a new creative work.
It has to be a creative work to qualify for copyright. It doesn’t have to be factually accurate, so fake changes to a map could qualify as a creatıve work, but using unicode substitutions to qualify as a new creatıve work doesn’t jive with the intention of copyrights. It’s really the same work just with alternate characters.
I concede, it’s always possible the courts surprise us, but assuming google has a legitimate license from the copyright holder as they say, then I still don’t think genius would have a good case for copyright infringement.
Fun fact, did you you notice I peppered by post with dotless I’s ‘ı’ versus ‘i’ 🙂
I was looking through character map, and starting at U+2000 unicode has dozens of different space characters. Assuming the unicode text is copied and pasted verbatum, you could create a watermark using nothing but space characters, I used some in the first sentence.
Alfman,
Copyright is about the specific expression of an idea. So the copyright owner owns the expression, even if the underlying text is in the public domain.
Anyone can still copy the original text that they have a licence for (or public domain). They can’t copy the copy. Of course, if the copy of the copy is exactly the same as the original, then it can’t be proved. But if the copy has modifications, then proving the copy is of the copy and not the original is easier.
Google only has a licence from the copyright holder of the original. Not from any other. They can copy from the original all they like, under the terms of their licence, but copying from Genius’ copy is not the same as copying from the original.
kwan_e,
Sure, but the work still has to have a minimally creative element to be eligible for copyright. The only question is one of threshold.
https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyrightable-works/creativity-requirement/
While the bar for creativity is low, it still must have creativity and trivial changes aren’t copyrightable. If you change some pixels in an image, those changes could be origianl and yet remain insufficiently creative to warrant new copyright protection. If you make trivial changes to source code, such as switching ” to ‘ in languages that support it, that could be original but may not be sufficiently creative to distinguish it from the original. However if you add/change comments in the code those changes probably would be considered a creative addition. If you take an audio/video clip and reencoding it to a new lossy format, you’ve technically modified the content in subtle ways that can be original, but it’s not necessarily sufficiently creative to be considered a new copyrightable work. Changing single-quote characters may be original while not being sufficiently creative to qualify for a new copyright. Maybe you believe it is, but we both should concede that a copyright case could go either way. I wouldn’t be surprised by either outcome. The point being, even proven changes might not be sufficiently creative to become copyrightable.
As mentioned above, you could copy a copy when the copier you copied from hasn’t demonstrated sufficient creativity to merit a new copyright on the work being copied in the first place (what a tongue twister!). Doubly so if the original copyright holder owner gave you explicit permission.
However, let us assume that the quote symbols are new creative works, that brings up it’s own legal questions such as whether genius was even allowed to “modify” the author’s work under it’s license? Now I don’t know much about music industry licensing, but with software licenses, modifications are often prohibited.
All these factors are what makes this an interesting case 🙂