I am not a lawyer, but my understanding is that only the copyright holder can sue for copyright infringement. I am pretty certain Genius does not hold the copyright to those lyrics. It's odd Genius brought this case at all. This is briefly noted at the end of the original article, but it seems like the whole point. Did I miss something?
From genius.com: "Genius Media Group, Inc. (GMG) is fully licensed to display lyrics across all of its properties. In 2013, GMG entered into licenses with every major music publisher: Sony/ATV Music Publishing, EMI Music Publishing, Universal Music Publishing Group, and Warner/Chappell Music. In addition, GMG developed a form license with the National Music Publishers' Association (NMPA) which today covers more than 96% of the independent publisher market."
Original copyright holder could give someone else authorisation to sue on their behalf, e.g., through an assignment. Doubtful Genius got an assignment in the agreements they have with publishers.
Also, Google claimed it is sub-licensed to re-publish through a third party, LyricFind, which has licenses with "over 4000" music publishers.
>Copyright holder could give someone else authorisation to sue on their behalf, e.g., through a license.
They can't assign the bare right to sue. To have standing the plaintiff will need to hold at least one of the exclusive rights in 17 U.S. Code § 106 aiui. Cf Righthaven cases, Silvers v Sony Pictures
I am almost certain you are correct, I would be shocked if genius was granted an exclusive right to lyrics. If nothing else, how could you sell the songs without rights to the lyrics?
So I don't think genius ever had standing to pursue this case.
Again, not a lawyer. But you'd think the actual lawyers would have checked this more carefully.
They are going to have a problem with standing for the exact reason you suggest. This case was one company who was scraping other people’s copyrighted works suing another company for doing the same.
Isn’t their main argument unfair competition? Google, the starting point of the internet, decided to undermine their business by taking their collated content and publishing it at the top of results?
Google appears to do this for other things, asking questions often shows answers without needing to visit the website. Perhaps these are all licensed and there is a kick back for these sites...
Google appear to be serving ads on content other people have collated while eliminating the source of traffic to the original site.. If that isn’t unfair business practice and taking advantage of their monopoly on search I don’t know what is.
But companies are absolutely allowed to do things that cause other companies to go out of business. It happens all the time. Think of the buggy whip manufacturers.
I agree that this Google practice looks dodgy to me. But the question is, what law specifically is being broken? This looks like a copyright case, and if that's the issue, then the copyright holder is the generally the one who has to bring the case in. (I believe there are exceptions such as when exclusive rights are granted, but I haven't seen a justification that they apply here.) That's what the law requires; otherwise the courts would be even more swamped.
You very well can, but that doesn't mean Google can't block you (CFAA protection). Genius here was reliant on Google for a large portion of their regular traffic so they couldn't just block Google without suffering revenue losses.
> Which means they are only not OK with scraping when Google uses the scrapped for purpose they deemed reduced their traffic
Obviously. The way the profit model for the internet works right now, for sites to coexist with Google, they must actually receive some of the traffic that is generated from searches matching their content. Who would be okay with having all of their content scraped with the result being that they get none of the traffic and thus the monetary benefit from the work they do?
Because they'll block you. You can prevent Google from indexing your content using robots.txt (Google has a robots.txt on its site as well).
You don't have a right to access their service as many times as you want to, eg by automated means, although you can attempt it. Flip a coin on whether they sue to stop you if you become too annoying.
The Genius complaint is essentially that they want to be represented in Google search without having Google take lyrics from their service and use them in their own served-up content snippets (making a sizable part of the value of genius.com void). Genius knows Google can get lyrics elsewhere if they have to, the lawsuit is probably out of spite due to past conflict with Google and their annoyance at Google competing with them in a shady way (Google was de facto using Genius's service to reduce the value of Genius).
That's correct however the publishing company that administers an artists royalties is generally the one to bring the suit. This is the same type of royalty as sheet music.
I feel like this is a forgotten bit of history but for years Genius didn't pay royalties for reproducing lyrics instead choosing to claim that their own reprinting of lyrics fell under "fair use" guidelines:
>"David Lowery, frontman and songwriter for Cracker and Camper van Beethoven, is waging war on the sites he believes make money off song lyrics but don't pay the songwriter. Once he took a closer look at where his music was making money on the Internet, he realized: There were more people searching to find lyrics to his songs than searching to illegally download mp3s of his music. And he wasn't making money off those searches. Last November, after months of exhaustive and systematic Googling, he released something called The Undesirable Lyric Website List.
>"The National Music Publishers Association seized upon this list, and announced that it would be sending take-down notices to every single name. At the top of that list was the very popular Rap Genius."
>"Rap Genius has been around for a few years, and it's extremely popular. No ads, lots of traffic and, just recently, a major investment from one of the hottest venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. The founder of Rap Genius, Ilan Zechory, says the site doesn't belong on Lowery's list. Because it's way more than just transcribed lyrics. He says the site is more like a social network: a discussion board for music geeks and even some of the musicians themselves — prominent rappers like Nas and Rick Ross — to comment on their own lyrics. Artists, the founders say, love the site."
>"Just this week, Rap Genius announced that, despite its opinion that the site falls under the criteria for fair use, it's going to pay songwriters for posting their lyrics. It's just easier than fighting with music publishers, who've been very successful at going after other lyric sites in the past few years. ..."[1]
Genius claims that Google’s actions caused a decline in traffic to its site. The lawsuit was probably a way to assuage nervous investors (who have poured >70M into the company)
