Certainly portends to be an interest test of the fair use doctrine. However it ultimately plays out, I like Ilan's comeback:
Rap Genius Co-Founder Ilan Zechory said his New York company had not heard from the NMPA, "but we can't wait to have a conversation with them about how all writers can participate in and benefit from the Rap Genius knowledge project."
They've definitely added some lyrics to the internet that weren't previously there. Unfortunately, the rise of these aggregated ad-trap lyrics sites has also had the side-effect of crowding out better, more decentralized lyrics. Google seems to prefer these big centralized sites over the long-tail fan sites that provide higher-quality, curated and proofread lyrics.
When I search for, say, [joy division atrocity exhibition lyrics], I get 10 generic lyrics sites as my first page of Google results. But what I really want is to get a result more like this: http://www.joydiv.org/shadowplay/joyd/atrocity.html
Besides not being piled up with ads, those fan-curated sites typically have fewer spelling errors, actually attribute lyrics to specific versions of a song and note variations, etc. Of course, in the cases where I already know a good fan site, I can either go directly, or do a site: search in Google. But in other cases I have to click through pages of this junk.
What you've said pretty much applies to any topic you can search for. Some search engine (DDG?) really needs to add an option to only return pages with no (or at least fewer) ads.
I'd appreciate if someone could discuss what are the legal issues here. Basically, if I write a song, why does Rap Genius have the right to publish the lyrics on their website?
I wouldn't be surprised if in half an hour to an hour a lot of that information is annotated for you.
It's hard to see the power of Rap Genius unless you use it, but once you do, you realize it's very much a new protocol in the same vein that pg called Twitter a new protocol in 2009. What's special is that a company owns that protocol, and you don't feel like it's owned by someone else.
RG's only power comes from breaking escape velocity and accumulating a community of people willing to spend time clicking on a string of text and adding more text.
They have to grow as fast as they can into everything because in just one cycle they can easily retreat and end up as just another features company.
Most twitter users don't tweet, they just follow. Getting the big users on board and figuring out they everyday people don't need to tweet was one of the big epiphanies.
If you look at the google trends, they were basically stagnant until 2009 when they made that realization and focused on activating users by getting them to follow a certain number of consistent tweeters.
With consumer stuff, nothing is ever cemented, but I can assure you that RG is doing quite well wrt to growing that community.
Fair Use[0] would cover it, I should think. The primary use of lyrics on RG is educational in nature - that is, explaining the meanings behind the lyrics.
Lyrics are a very small part of the completed music as a whole. It's not even the same medium as music, let alone just a small part of the same medium.
1) In order to mount a fair use defense, you must admit that you are infringing on copyright. It is kind of like an insanity murder defense in that way.
2) Fair use for education and commentary is most often used to protect the publishing of excerpts, such as in book reviews or textbooks discussing a type of work.
3) Or you can do fair use transformative commentary or parody. But in this case, the work must be significantly altered (transformed). And you must demonstrate you could not make the point you were making without using that specific work as source material, usually because your commentary was about that work. In my non-attorney opinion this is closest to Rap Genius's scenario, but if you try for this and lose, your work can be considered derivative work and is wholly owned by the original copyright holder.
4) In general, it makes you less sympathetic when you mount a fair use defense while profiting from republishing the work, although that isn't a strict identifier.
5) As mentioned elsewhere on this thread, Rap Genius and other lyrics sites aren't publishing the lyrics to just one song, the lyrics are the core content of the site. That could make fair use more difficult to argue.
I'm glad at least there's a big target (Rap Genius) to hopefully fight this fight for the little guys, even if I don't like the direction the site(s) are going.
What fight is that, precisely? What exact principle would you like Rap Genius to defend on everyone's behalf? Because at first glance it might seem like you are referring to the right to publish someone else's work for profit without paying them anything.
at first glance it might seem like you are referring to the right to publish someone else's work for profit without paying them anything.
The thing is that the value in this case is not in the lyrics themselves but in the transcription and compilation into a central database. The people looking them up already have a copy - they are listening to the song. A transcription is something they could do themselves if they wanted to put in the effort.
From a maximalist perspective you are quite correct. But from the perspective of how much the publication affects the market for the lyrics I think it is reasonable to conclude that at worst the impact is marginal and in the vast majority of cases it has none at all.
It is actually the right to exclude others from making copies.
It is not an absolute right either. Even the most hardcore maximalists accept that there are some conditions under which that right does not exist, c.f. Jack Valenti's acknowledgement that it would be unconstitutional if the term of copyright was forever.
IMO Rap Genius falls squarely within the fair use safe harbor of copyright law, since it provides educational/critical analysis of lyrics rather than simply republishing them for profit.
True, but lyrics are only a portion of a musical work, and in general they're a pretty small amount of text (compared to, say, the median news article). I think RG would respond by pointing out that the volume of commentary frequently dwarfs source material.
Not to mention, the content is the center of all that is RapGenius. It is educational/critical analysis of lyrics, written by people.
Would we expect annotated versions of books to be free? No. Would we expect critiques of movies... with the movies themselves to be free? No. That argument just doesn't hold any water.
I guess it's not really about that. It's that artists (besides mainstream ones) need all they can get from any source they can get it -- they really do, just to get by.
The two sides are: artists just can't make it through with a little pay with little sources of revenue, or we don't get our lyrics, tabs, and/or the songs themselves for free. It's a difficult balance where solutions are hard to find.
It's worthwhile to basically see lyrics as poetry. Poets get by by selling poetry (well, few, in this day and age), lyricists/songwriters should also ideally be able to get by.
Part of the problem is that there's a lot of good music available to me. Literally more than I can ever listen to, much of it for free online.
I think the music industry has to adjust to handouts (eg, donations on their site) and merchandise/performances rather than viewing the song itself as something worth selling.
If there's a barrier to me using the music easily, including unavailability of the lyrics, not only am I not going to spend money on things that make them more money (shows, merchandise, etc), but there are a dozen other artists who are all clamoring to make it easy for me to hear their music.
The song - and attached lyrics - should be a way to get me to buy other things or given them money after, and not try to be "sold" to me.
The Harry Fox agency (harryfox.com) is the industry broker for music publication licensing, virtually everything in the US can be licensed through them.
You license them from the publishers, as LyricFind did
Looks like LyricFind is owned by Gracenote. Considering that Gracenote got its start by absconding with user-submitted CDDB data, submitted with the understanding that it was GPL'd, that they would pay for lyrics licensing is ironic.
As a user, I just want to be able to type some fragment of lyrics into google and see what song it is. I don't care about the underlying ideological issues (at least, not as much as I care about the usability of finding lyrics). I'm a bit annoyed that rapgenius and all its affiliated sites are taking over the top spots in google, but at least their ads are less annoying than all the other lyrics site.
If the officially licensed rightsholders of those lyrics would like to also make a site, so be it, but it seems they are a bit late to the party.
Rap Genius Co-Founder Ilan Zechory said his New York company had not heard from the NMPA, "but we can't wait to have a conversation with them about how all writers can participate in and benefit from the Rap Genius knowledge project."