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Lyrics Site Accuses Google of Lifting Its Content

Discussion in 'Article Discussion' started by Melody Bot, Jun 17, 2019.

  1. Melody Bot Jun 17, 2019
    Melody Bot

    Your friendly little forum bot. Staff Member

    This article has been imported from chorus.fm for discussion. All of the forum rules still apply.

    The Wall Street Journal:


    Genius Media Group Inc. depends on Google’s search engine to send music lovers to its website stocked with hard-to-decipher lyrics to hip-hop songs and other pop hits.

    Now Genius says its traffic is dropping because, for the past several years, Google has been publishing lyrics on its own platform, with some of them lifted directly from the music 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.”
    ​

    Expand - View Original
     
  2. rbf737 Jun 17, 2019
    rbf737

    Regular

    Yeah I've noticed that myself over the last year or so.
     
    Jared Luttrell likes this.
  3. DandonTRJ Jun 17, 2019
    DandonTRJ

    ~~~ヾ(＾∇＾ Supporter

    Of course they buried the important paragraph at the bottom:

    Doesn't matter how much work they put into ensuring accuracy of the transcriptions. There's no "sweat of the brow" protection.
     
    Ska Senanake likes this.
  4. ALineInYourBook Jun 17, 2019
    ALineInYourBook

    Newbie

    This has been pretty apparent for a while now. I've seen the same errors in lyrics show up in Google results and on Genius several times. Unfortunately, nothing really to do about it, it's just shady, not illegal.
     
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  6. jciswhatis Jun 17, 2019
    jciswhatis

    Ugh, I hate America. Supporter

    I'm really curious how this one plays out... not from the stealing the content per se but the fact that google is killing site's hits and visits. They do the same thing with Wiki.
     
    Jared Luttrell, slickdtc and heymattrick like this.
  7. heymattrick Jun 17, 2019
    heymattrick

    Sending my love

    Yeah this is fascinating to me too. Ultimately, since the lyrics are copyrighted material, I’m curious what pull Genius has in this case. They basically republish others’ copyrighted work.

    Furthermore, the lyrics are almost always incorrect. I like that Apple Music has the lyrics function baked in, but when the lyrics are usually wrong, it doesn’t help.
     
  8. slickdtc Jun 17, 2019
    slickdtc

    Regular Supporter

    Glad you mentioned it. Google pulls the top relevant info from any site. Just do any “how do I...” search and it’ll pull from any numbers of places without having to actually go to the site. Just did it for how to change a tire, a little summary is taken right from Bridgestone.com.

    Seems like the tip of a larger argument.
     
    Jared Luttrell and jciswhatis like this.