Numlock News: December 4, 2019 • Cannonball, Tumblr, Lyrics Law
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By Walt Hickey Lyrics Lawsuit Genius Media Group, which publishes music lyrics, filed a $50 million lawsuit against Google and LyricFind, a rival site that contracts with the search giant, over allegations the companies lifted lyrics from Genius without attribution. Granted, Genius does not in fact own any of the copyrights pertaining to the lyrics, but they did catch them red-handed lifting their transcriptions. Back in June, Genius announced it had watermarked 301 song transcriptions using weird spacing from October to December 2018, and found that 116 of them — 39 percent — wound up on lyric boxes on Google. This can have a big impact: when "Lose You To Love Me" by Selena Gomez has lyrics on Genius but not Google, 75 percent of people searching clicked through, and it got 600,000 page views. Once Google posted the lyrics — sourced to LyricFind, but containing the tell-tale Genius watermark — click through fell to 5 percent. In August, they made a new watermark, and claim that they found over 1,000 such examples on Google, 828 of which were still on Google.
Numlock News: December 4, 2019 • Cannonball, Tumblr, Lyrics Law
Numlock News: December 4, 2019 • Cannonball…
Numlock News: December 4, 2019 • Cannonball, Tumblr, Lyrics Law
By Walt Hickey Lyrics Lawsuit Genius Media Group, which publishes music lyrics, filed a $50 million lawsuit against Google and LyricFind, a rival site that contracts with the search giant, over allegations the companies lifted lyrics from Genius without attribution. Granted, Genius does not in fact own any of the copyrights pertaining to the lyrics, but they did catch them red-handed lifting their transcriptions. Back in June, Genius announced it had watermarked 301 song transcriptions using weird spacing from October to December 2018, and found that 116 of them — 39 percent — wound up on lyric boxes on Google. This can have a big impact: when "Lose You To Love Me" by Selena Gomez has lyrics on Genius but not Google, 75 percent of people searching clicked through, and it got 600,000 page views. Once Google posted the lyrics — sourced to LyricFind, but containing the tell-tale Genius watermark — click through fell to 5 percent. In August, they made a new watermark, and claim that they found over 1,000 such examples on Google, 828 of which were still on Google.