Supreme Court Rejects Lawsuit Accusing Google of Stealing Millions of Song Lyrics (bloomberg.com) 35
The US Supreme Court refused to revive a lawsuit by music website Genius Media accusing Alphabet's Google of stealing millions of song lyrics. From a report: The justices left in place a ruling that tossed out the suit, which accused Google of violating a contract with Genius by using its song lyrics in search results without attribution. It's the latest victory at the Supreme Court for Google, which earlier this year won a battle over whether its video-streaming platform YouTube can be held liable for hosting terrorist videos.
There are deep disagreements over how copyright laws apply to online speech and aggregation. The lower court said Genius does not own any of the copyrights to its lyrics -- instead, those are held by the songwriters and publishers. Genius claimed that Google violated its contract by scraping lyrics and boosting them in Google Search results without any attribution. Genius, which claimed the saga caused millions of dollars in losses for the website, initially sued Google in 2019. In order to drum up attention and prove its case, Genius said it used a secret code spelling out the word "red-handed" to prove Google was stealing its lyrics. "We appreciate the court's decision, agreeing with the Solicitor General and multiple lower courts that Genius' claims have no merit," Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said Monday. "We license lyrics on Google Search from third parties, and we do not crawl or scrape websites to source lyrics."
There are deep disagreements over how copyright laws apply to online speech and aggregation. The lower court said Genius does not own any of the copyrights to its lyrics -- instead, those are held by the songwriters and publishers. Genius claimed that Google violated its contract by scraping lyrics and boosting them in Google Search results without any attribution. Genius, which claimed the saga caused millions of dollars in losses for the website, initially sued Google in 2019. In order to drum up attention and prove its case, Genius said it used a secret code spelling out the word "red-handed" to prove Google was stealing its lyrics. "We appreciate the court's decision, agreeing with the Solicitor General and multiple lower courts that Genius' claims have no merit," Google spokesman Jose Castaneda said Monday. "We license lyrics on Google Search from third parties, and we do not crawl or scrape websites to source lyrics."
I don't really get it (Score:4, Interesting)
Even if their case had legal merits I'm not sure they'd be able to demonstrate damages because their own pleading would disprove that.
Re:I don't really get it (Score:5, Informative)
No, their complaint is to do with Google's search results including full lyrics to songs without requiring the user to click through to the site which provided those lyrics, depriving that site of ad revenue.
yeah well (Score:1)
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....uh no? (Score:1)
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Re:I don't really get it (Score:5, Interesting)
I think their claim is that since Google presents lyrics directly in the search result, rather than only sending links to other sites, that traffic that would have gone to their site is effectively being stopped by Google, and that this all happens based on Google having crawled them to begin with.
Thing is, these aren't their lyrics to start with. This is like the copying-a-phonebook sort of situation from the point of view of the middleman being copied. If anyone has a legitimate objection, the copyright holders who wrote the lyrics or obtained the licensing for them would, not the middleman who performed an aggregation. For the purposes of the logging of the lyrics to perform a lookup, these are simply facts to reference, not different than listings in a telephone directory.
It sounds like the lyric website was established under a flawed premise for a business, and rather than acknowledge that they didn't have any particular right to whatever work they did in building their records, they tried to litigate their profits. And they found out the hard way that their work doesn't really count for anything.
Re:I don't really get it (Score:4, Funny)
It sounds like the lyric website was established under a flawed premise for a business,
That describes nearly the entire internet.
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The fact that Google chose to copy from them, instead of sourcing the lyrics directly from the copyright holders, proves that Genius Media added value to the lyrics. To me, that counts for something even though the law currently only respects the original copyright holder.
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Yes, they've added "sweat of the brow," explicitly exempted from copyright claims since telephone book litigation.
Nobody doubts telephone books continued to have value, but most of us in our right minds would not say Google is obligated to show us a local telecom company's ad before providing us with a phone number.
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Their complaint is that Google crawling their site made them more popular and this as a result caused them to lose money? I'm pretty sure Google respects robots.txt so it's trivial to avoid being crawled and indexed, which by their logic should make their ranking fall, but somehow result in more money.
Even if their case had legal merits I'm not sure they'd be able to demonstrate damages because their own pleading would disprove that.
Google stopped respecting robots.txt years ago
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Spreading misinformation [google.com] isn't justified just because you don't like Google.
Nothing to do with my feelings about Google
https://www.searchenginejourna... [searchenginejournal.com]
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That article only states that the noindex directive is not going to be honored any longer because it is a "non-standard" directive.
But nothing in the article is saying that robots.txt will no longer be honored.
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Nothing to do with my feelings about Google
I doubt that, but regardless, it doesn't change the fact that your post was misinformation.
Your link says that Google is no longer "respecting" the noindex option in robots.txt. This is because it's non-standard.
Google respects noindex as a metatag in the html. [google.com]
But let's talk about why you linked to an article that doesn't even support your claim? Gaslighting? Again, in defense of Google, or are you just seriously that intellectually lazy?
Interesting case study (Score:2)
Two groups, neither of them owning the copyrights, fighting over the use of the material and the ability to profit from it. Google claims that they do not scrape Genius' lyrics, that they pay another company for the information. Apparently that other company does scrape it, though, as evidenced by the honey pot. Does Genius pay royalties to the artist? If so, they have a moral leg to stand on. If not, then they're dodgy as hell, and it's fighting between parasites.
Re:Interesting case study (Score:4, Informative)
Well, a bit of digging provided a bit of info. First, they were formerly called "Rap Genius", and they were sued over the use of the lyrics. They subsequently did, in fact, sign agreements to pay for the use of the material.
Now the question becomes, if you don't own the copyright, can you then sue another company for copying your copy? And apparently the answer is no.
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Well, a bit of digging provided a bit of info. First, they were formerly called "Rap Genius", and they were sued over the use of the lyrics. They subsequently did, in fact, sign agreements to pay for the use of the material.
Now the question becomes, if you don't own the copyright, can you then sue another company for copying your copy? And apparently the answer is no.
Now the question becomes, if you don't own the copyright, can you then sue another company for copying your copy? And apparently the answer is no.
Especially if the other company has licensed the material from the copyright holder. That license gives them permission to reproduce, it does not specify where they have to get the material from.
Of course, if Rap Genius were to publish original lyrics (with minimal creative content; inserting "red handed" into someone else's obviously doesn't qualify), and Google scraped and displayed them without permission, well, now we'd be in an ordinary copyright case with the owner suing Google for what the owner ga
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but I'd have expected the district court to dismiss it on the grounds that Rap Genius lacks standing to sue for infringement of copyrights they don't own.
The District Court did. It was appealed. Supreme Court refused to remit back to the District Court.
I.e., they agreed- Genius lacked standing.
In the District Court case, Genius tried to argue that the works were derived works, but District Court was unconvinced that a licensee of a copyrighted work not specifically authorized to produce derivative works could claim copyright over said works.
i.e., you're dead-on.
TL;DR (Score:2)
Genius Media relied on a ToS. They do not appear to have had a "contract" with Google directly, nor did they appear to take reasonable measures to provide robots.txt, etc. that would have informed Google's scrapers to not go there.
The Supreme Court did not rule that copyright law preempted complete action against Google, they ruled it pre-empted their attempt to use copyright law incorrectly to do a federal attack on a contractual dispute.
Note that Genius Media can still sue, and possibly win, at the state
Maybe an obvious question, but... (Score:2)
Did they get ... (Score:2)
This was so stupid: (Score:2)
1. Google never had a contract with Genius
2. Google didn't even steal the lyrics, it was done by a third party who Google contracted that to (why didn't Genius sue them?)
3. Genius/Google/3rd Company doesn't even own the text.
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I think a more apt description would be one junky calling the cops on another junky for stealing their heroin stash. Nobody seems clean in this one.
Genius lyrics stole from my site (Score:1)
Interestng case study (Score:1)
Get The Best Services (Score:1)
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