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The Courts Google

Supreme Court Asks for Biden Administration's Views in Google Copyright Case (reuters.com) 30

Posted by msmash from the closer-look dept.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday asked the Biden administration to weigh in on song-lyric website Genius' attempt to revive a lawsuit over Google's alleged theft of its work. From a report: The justices are considering whether to hear ML Genius Holdings LLC's bid to overturn a U.S. appeals court's ruling that its case against Google LLC was preempted by federal copyright law. The Supreme Court often asks for the solicitor general's input on cases in which the U.S. government may have an interest.

Genius, formerly known as Rap Genius, keeps a database of song lyrics and annotations maintained by volunteers. It sued Google and its partner LyricFind in New York state court in 2019 for allegedly posting its lyric transcriptions at the top of Google search results without permission. Genius argued Google violated its terms of service by stealing its work and reposting it on Google webpages, decreasing traffic to Genius' site. The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in March affirmed a decision to dismiss the case, finding Genius' breach-of-contract claims were based on copyright concerns and should have been brought under copyright law.
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Supreme Court Asks for Biden Administration's Views in Google Copyright Case More

Supreme Court Asks for Biden Administration's Views in Google Copyright Case

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  • Wasn't Genius guilty of copyright infringement too (Score:5, Insightful)

    by lowvisioncomputing ( 10234616 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @10:31AM (#63129948) Homepage Journal
    Just because the transcribing of song lyrics was done by volunteers doesn't mean that reposting the lyrics on Genius' own site wasn't also a copyright violation.

    • That may well NOT have been copyright violation. Music copyrights are ... strange. The lyrics are often older than the combination lyrics+music, and anyway music, just by itself, has pretty strange copyrights.

      But when Genius had they lyrics transcribed, the result was text, and then falls under text copyrights. So the laws are different.

      • The lyrics are covered by copyright whether they're transcribed or not, so there's really no legal confusion there. The confusion over whether Genius can make a copyright violation claim would seem to rest on whether the transcribed lyrics are considered a derivative work, or just a presentation of an existing copyrighted work. But a derivative work is supposed to have to include significant changes, so there's a strong argument that transcribed lyrics aren't that, and therefore Genius not only can't have had copyright on any of that material — they would have been making false copyright claims. IANAL, but this is my take based on lawyers' publicly professed opinions-which-are-[also-]not-legal-advice.

        • The lyrics are covered by copyright whether they're transcribed or not, so there's really no legal confusion there.

          Yes, otherwise I could "transcribe" an audiobook and then claim a copyright on the resulting text. Genius has no leg to stand on here. The fact that their copyright violation took more work than Google's is of no relevance.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by lowvisioncomputing ( 10234616 )

          Feiss v Rural pretty much covers this, but in the reverse sense. [wikipedia.org]

          Rural tried to argue that their phone book's list of numbers was covered by copyright. However, the list of phone numbers themselves is not subject to copyright, because there is no "creative work" in assigning the phone numbers themselves - they're just facts, same as 2+2=4 is a fact. Your street address is a fact. Your name is a fact. And "sweat of the brow" work to generate that list doesn't get rewarded with copyright - it's just a comp

          • What if they're really bad lyrics, and an expert can testify before the court that the songwriter was utterly devoid of creativity?

            • What if they're really bad lyrics, and an expert can testify before the court that the songwriter was utterly devoid of creativity?

              WEll, there IS a lot of that ... totally derivative crap ... but that's always been the case.

              We see that in real life as well, people copying the basic idea without really understanding what goes into it.

              Example 1 - the show "Two Broke Girls" about how 2 broke girls open a cupcake shop to try to make extra money. So then you see a ton of people trying to sell "gourmet cup cakes." And as each one opens shop, everyone else thinks "there must be money in this" and opens a competing shop. Then they all go b

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Ichijo ( 607641 )

            Rural tried to argue that their phone book's list of numbers was covered by copyright. However, the list of phone numbers themselves is not subject to copyright, because there is no "creative work" in assigning the phone numbers themselves - they're just facts, same as 2+2=4 is a fact.

            I wonder if this argument can be used to help free science from for-profit publishers. [slashdot.org]

            • Rural tried to argue that their phone book's list of numbers was covered by copyright. However, the list of phone numbers themselves is not subject to copyright, because there is no "creative work" in assigning the phone numbers themselves - they're just facts, same as 2+2=4 is a fact.

              I wonder if this argument can be used to help free science from for-profit publishers. [slashdot.org]

              The problem is that most peer-reviewed science is basically a work of fiction, with "editorial support" (ie: ghost-written papers) by pharmaceutical reps. That's what's at the root of the current reproducibility crisis - 90% of all the papers, the results simply can't be reproduced.

              The Replication Crisis [wikipedia.org]

              The seminal paper on the subject is discussed here Why Most Published Research Findings Are False [wikipedia.org] by John Ioannidis. There's a link to his original paper as well.

            • I wonder if this argument can be used to help free science from for-profit publishers. [slashdot.org]

              Unlikely. While facts can't be copyrighted, the presentation of facts can be copyrighted. For instance, the facts in an infographic may not be subject to copyright, but the infographic itself is a creative presentation of those facts—a creative work—and thus is protected by copyright.

              Going back to the phone book example, you can transcribe numbers from the phone book and share them as you please without issue, but you can't simply scan the phone book and repost it without alteration because you

    • IIRC, Google got a blanket license to reproduce lyrics, but scraped some lyrics with fake lines from Rap Genius. Even if Rap Genius also had a license, it seems analogous to the fake names that phonebooks used to use to discourage copying.

      I get the Rap Genius doesn't like Google free-riding off their transcription efforts. but I don't think they should be successful in suing a licensee to monetize the efforts of their volunteers.

    • I remember when lyrics.ch got taken down by the RIAA because of copyright claims over lyrics. The guy behind it ran some ads to help cover costs even though I think he said he didn't break even, and the RIAA's claim was that any income made the entire site illegal.

      It appears, though, that Genius does negotiate rights to display the content, or at least they claim to in their petition for certiorari [thomsonreuters.com]:

      Through the power of crowdsourcing, as well as labor-intensive and costly in-house efforts, Genius transcribes

      • If any licensing agreement entered into between the licensor and the licensee doesn't include granting the right to sue for violations of copyright, then it would seem like Genius lacks standing. Google isn't copying the presentation, and Genius doesn't hold the copyrights to the lyrics.

      • the RIAA's claim was that any income made the entire site illegal.

        No. Copyright infringement is illegal whether there's income or not -- income doesn't change the legal status. All the income does is give the RIAA something to extract to pay their lawyers and justify the time, because you can't get blood from a stone.

    • Okay, so Google is guilty of copyright violation of Genius AND / OR copyright violation of the song lyrics themselves. Either way Google seems guilty of one or both.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by thomst ( 1640045 )

      lowvisioncomputing opined:

      Just because the transcribing of song lyrics was done by volunteers doesn't mean that reposting the lyrics on Genius' own site wasn't also a copyright violation.

      Genius's copyright claim is just stupid. If it actually wanted to prevent Google from scraping its site, it need only have incorporated by default a <noindex> section to that effect in its web pages. It did not do so, presumably because it wanted Google to include links to its site for users doing lyric searches, but it wanted the Goog to force those users to go to Genius's website to see the results.

      It's just an attempt on Genius's part to extort go-away money from Google. I

  • Genius doesn't have standing here. They don't own the copyrights to the lyrics. They license the lyrics. Just like Google licenses the lyrics.

    It doesn't matter where you get the lyrics from as long as you have a license to the lyrics from the owner of the copyright.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by pavon ( 30274 )

      Hence why they tried to make it about a violation of the ToS rather than copyright, since they know they don't have standing when it comes to copyright.

  • robots.txt (Score:3)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Wednesday December 14, 2022 @01:12PM (#63130368) Homepage

    Here we go again. If they don't want their stuff showing up on Google, all they have to do is fill in their robots.txt accordingly. This is not hard. The same goes for all those news organizations.

    OH. They *do* want found? Wow, what a surprise...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by kc-guy ( 1108521 )
      There's more to it than this. Google was scraping their content without permission and adding it to infoboxes that showed up as a Google Search result, meaning that you had no reason to actually go to the Groove website. They were using information created by Groove for a for-profit purpose. That's infringement, and a TOS violation.
      • The entire point of robots.txt is to declare to a webcrawler what to index and what not to. If you don't want Google to index your lyrics, or anything else for that matter, simply define the uri in robots.txt.

        Also, if a blank page description in google's search results isn't enough for you, Google is more than happy to tell you how to keep the page from showing up at all [google.com].

        This is a solved problem, and one which any decent web admin should be able to implement in a few minutes. It's pointless to complain

  • This is like when my dad used to ask me about tech or car topics. Or my ex-wife asked me anything, then did the opposite.

    Don't fall for it Biden

  • Hard to know who I want to lose.

    Maybe the court can decide: "These lyrics are more than five years old, so obviously the copyright privilege has expired and anyone is now be able to use them freely. Except for Google, cos you're spying cunts."

  • When the subject is in some way political and involves an administration, it's fine to say "the Biden administration" or "the Trump administration", etc. but when the action is non-partisan and a normal government operation between the branches it would be better to say "the executive branch" or "the administration" etc to remove the implication of partisanship and make it clear the article covers something non-political. This particular instance is one of those cases - the judicial branch often asks the ex

  • Genius tried to bring a copyright suit against Google but claimed it was a breach of contract suit. The courts just said "This is a copyright suit, file it under that instead" and Genius didn't.

    This wasn't a ruling for or against their claim, just that they filed the suit wrong. That's entirely reasonable.

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