This was complicated by GeniusвЂ™s knowledge that Google licensed song lyrics from third parties, specifically LyricFind. However, Genius couldnвЂ™t be sure that Google copied lyrics from its site and hadnвЂ™t acquired them somewhere else. In connection with your use of the Service you shall not engage in or use any data mining, robots, scraping or similar data gathering or extraction methods.вЂќДЄ couple of years ago Genius noticed that some song lyrics published in Google вЂњInformation BoxesвЂќ were suspiciously similar to Genius lyrics based on punctuation, contractions and line breaks. вЂњyou agree not to modify, copy, frame, scrape, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute or create derivative works based on the Service or the Genius Content. ItвЂ™s website contains the following terms of service: Since Genius has no copyright ownership, it tries to use contract law to prevent copying. So it owns a compilation of lyrics, but canвЂ™t assert a copyright in that content. However, Genius doesnвЂ™t own the lyrics вЂ“ it licenses the right to publish them from authors and publishers. Many of these lyrics are crowd-sourced by the Genius user community.

Or, perhaps youвЂ™ve licensed the components of the database and you donвЂ™t own the copyright in them.

You might be unable to use copyright law because itвЂ™s a database or compilation that lacks sufficient originality. Two aspects of this new case (only a complaint so far) are interesting вЂ“ the way that Genius established that Google was scraping, which is quite clever, and the basis for GeniusвЂ™s legal claim which appears to be quite weak.ДЄssume you have a work that you want to protect from copying but that you canвЂ™t copyright. Genius Media Group Inc., the owner of the music lyric site has sued Google and LyricFind for вЂњscrapingвЂќ lyrics from the website.

A complicated song lyrics genius