Forum Moderators: goodroi
Google Accused of Lifting Content From Lyrics 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.”
In a written statement, Google said the lyrics on its site, which pop up in little search-result squares called “information panels,” are licensed from partners, not created by Google.
“We take data quality and creator rights very seriously and hold our licensing partners accountable to the terms of our agreement,” Google said.
...is lifting content from its site
It's more than that, imho, because it's highlighting potential scrapers which become content sources.
Same type of issue as with Getty right?
...Where the lyrics text comes fromAnd, in reaction to Genius's complaints....
Here’s something you might not know: music publishers often don’t have digital copies of the lyrics text. In these cases, we -- like music streaming services and other companies -- license the lyrics text from third parties.
We do not crawl or scrape websites to source these lyrics. The lyrics that you see in information boxes on Search come directly from lyrics content providers, and they are updated automatically as we receive new lyrics and corrections on a regular basis....
...To help make it clearer where the lyrics come from, we’ll soon include attribution to the third party providing the digital lyrics text. We will continue to take an approach that respects and compensates rights-holders, and ensures that music publishers and songwriters are paid for their work.
Recently, a Wall Street Journal reporter proceeded with an article accusing Google of scraping lyrics from Genius and placing them in Google’s search results, despite clear responses from both LyricFind and Google that this was not the case. To address the inaccuracies in the initial article and the reporting that followed, we would like to correct the record in this matter.
The lyrics in question were provided to Google by LyricFind, as was confirmed to WSJ prior to publication. Google licenses lyrics content from music publishers (the rightful owner of the lyrics) and from LyricFind. To accuse them of any wrongdoing is extremely misleading.
LyricFind invests heavily in a global content team to build its database. That content team will often start their process with a copy of the lyric from numerous sources (including direct from artists, publishers, and songwriters), and then proceed to stream, correct, and synchronize that data. Most content our team starts with requires significant corrections before it goes live in our database...
It should be reiterated that Genius themselves have no ownership of the lyric rights - music publishers and songwriters do. Genius sources lyrics from user submissions, and those users may not be transcribing from scratch. LyricFind has a fifteen-year history of proper licensing and payments to rightsholders, and we’re extremely proud of our role in creating this valuable revenue stream for songwriters. We’ll continue that mission.
Brian White, called out Google's ranking team for crediting the wrong band for the song Behind Blue Eyes.
I don't think the third party is responsible, rather the ranking team who chose the Limp Bizkit version as canonical performance for that query (see [behind blue eyes lyrics who]).
