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.
Comments
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've posted the article to Rap Genius http://news.rapgenius.com/Alex-pham-nmpa-targets-unlicensed-...
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.
You could argue the same thing about twitter.
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.
Here's the google trends link btw http://www.google.ca/trends/explore?q=twitter#q=twitter&cmpt...
You can see that Twitter survived off blog hype and early adopters for 2 years.
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.
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
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.
They don't, thus lawsuit.
Actually I think they do. Check out Fair Use[0].
[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use