25
votes
Lyrics website Genius.com accuses Google of lifting its content
Link information
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- Title
- [Update: Google statement] Google allegedly used stolen Genius lyrics, caught through Morse code trick
- Published
- Jun 19 2019
- Word count
- 391 words
Matters of plagiarism aside, I love the apostrophe-encoded secret message. Makes me wonder what sorts of other steganographic content is hidden in plain sight on frequented parts of the web.
A nice Wikipedia rabbit-hole around a similar topic would be the Trap Street used by cartographers and mapping companies.
Yeah, the secret message thing made me so happy. It reminded me a bit of notpr0n or something
Techdirt had a good article about this yesterday, which discusses how insane the whole concept of "licensing lyrics" is and what a mess it all is and how it all probably doesn't matter very much in the end anyway: Dumbest 'Gotcha' Story Of The Week: Google, Genius And The Copying Of Licensed Lyrics
There was also an article on WIRED about it, which includes the interesting point that Bing and Amazon Music also seem to include the same "watermarked" lyrics, but Genius doesn't seem to be making a fuss about those.
The WSJ source article is behind a paywall, hence the Android Police link instead.
This was my first thought exactly. Whether Google is lifting lyrics from the site or not is irrelevant. Genius doesn't own the rights to that content in the first place. I don't understand the basis of Genius' lyrics.
This would be the same as a mapping product, wouldn't it? Google doesn't own the roads, but have invested effort into developing Google Maps and enriching mapping to provide useful services to consumers. Just as genius.com don't own the lyrics to the song, they provide a service for others which they can set their own terms and conditions for.
This is really an interesting way to look at it. I agree.
As I understand it, they aren't claiming a right to the lyrics themselves, but claiming they provide a service in getting the lyrics from official sources and making them available. By lifting lyrics from their sites, Google is essentially using their services in a manner that breaches their terms. I can kinda see the logic there, but I doubt it would hold up in court.
I may be totally off base there though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Sure, but they can specify that they don't want their bots crawling their site, but then they'll no longer show up in search results, which would probably hurt them more.
Plus ads. Google algorithms probably help Genius in terms of banner ad revenue.
I just feel obligated to point out these are not "cursive and straight apostrophes," they are the difference between an apostrophe (the angled one) and a ditto. Although, I understand where they're coming from, as most platforms use the ditto as a replacement for the apostrophe.
I appreciate this nitpick for what it is but it seems inaccurate. There are conflicting names and identities for these characters arising from: historical handwriting and typography; mechanical typewriters; ASCII; and several Unicode standard revisions.
Arguably, since these characters (the specific ones Genius wrote) were only ever intended to be used on a computer for steganography, they truly are nothing more than Unicode code points. Then the names of these characters are "right single quotation mark (’)" and "apostrophe (')". Note that the right single quotation mark is often printed curly.
The 128 first Unicode code points were copied from ASCII, although it's not clear to me what the plan was here since UTF-8 wouldn't appear for another year or so. In any case, evidently the apostrophe (U+0027) conflated apostrophes, single quotation marks, and other single-stroke marks, just as ASCII and earlier typewriters had. (Were typewriter apostrophes straight for some specific reason?) See also "hyphen–minus (U+002D)".
Unicode 1.0 (published 1991) has "apostrophe–quote ' (U+0027)", "modifier letter apostrophe ʼ (U+02BC)", "single turned comma quotation mark ‘ (U+2018)", and "single comma quotation mark ’ (U+2019)". They're very hard to distinguish in this font — in fact the second and fourth are usually visually identical. This standard also notes that "modifier letter apostrophe […] is the preferred character for apostrophe".
Unicode 1.0 also has "ditto mark (U+3003)", which is a CJK (Chinese/Japanese/Korean) punctuation character that looks like this: 〃. All the sources I interneted just now indicate that English ditto marks also historically have two strokes, not one.
Later versions of Unicode renamed U+2018 and U+2019 as "left single quotation mark" and "right single quotation mark". They also changed to say that "right single quotation mark […] is the preferred character to use for apostrophe", which this blog post criticises in depth. (The argument is essentially that English apostrophes are not simply a punctuation mark but rather part of a single word.)
In summary, I agree that it is strictly incorrect to call them "cursive" and "straight" apostrophes, but only because they have better technical names. They are semantically equivalent, both in practice and by decree. And furthermore I argue that it is not correct to call either a "ditto mark".
Does anyone have book recommendations on the history of teletypes or Unicode? Most of what I know is folk knowledge. It would be awesome to have a better foundation and more primary sources.
Marcin Wichary (https://twitter.com/mwichary) is writing a book on the history of keyboards, which I think touches on teletypes and Unicode a bit.
Thanks for sharing your insight, this was interesting to read through. I certainly didn't know a lot of that.