> 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.<p>> When the two types of apostrophes were converted to the dots and dashes used in Morse code, they spelled out the words “Red Handed.”<p>Clever. Reminds me of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street</a>.<p>Can Google really be so stupid/careless to just scrape Genius directly? Their explanation that they source these lyrics from someone, which in turn apparently scrapes Genius seems more plausible to me.
1) Extremely recent Repost <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194952" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20194952</a>
2) I find it extremely aggravating how needlessly accusatory the title is. It presumes guilt when its still technically an accusation
Relevant history how they had to be forced into agreeing to pay royalties for lyrics <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/business/media/rap-genius-website-agrees-to-license-with-music-publishers.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/07/business/media/rap-genius...</a> (via @CaseyNewton <a href="https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1140266508318334977" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/CaseyNewton/status/1140266508318334977</a>)
They don’t really own the lyrics in any case. In traditional publishing you would have to pay the original artist to reproduce the lyrics, as you have to do for poems and other lyrical works.
Anyone here remember lyrics.ch and their inevitable takedown?<p>The copyright situation is not complicated; lyric copyright resides with the songwriter, and is usually sublicensed exclusively to the publisher. Like Napsterisation, these were forced open by hugely widespread infringement, and eventually a stalemate has been reached between publishers and the internet.<p>Like youtube, this will result in lots of weird anomalies where ownership is disputed and the publishers claim all sorts of things they're not technically entitled to.<p>Like a lot of other things, the publisher may never have made a clean official copy of the lyrics available, so the actual compilation is done by third parties - but that doesn't grant them a formal copyright in that work. (Unless the weird sui generis right of databases comes into play)