Tweet thread: Ugh, I need to let out a rant about Google Lyrics and Genius because there is so much bad faith and hypocrisy to go around. Let's start with this article that is doing the rounds:https://www.wsj.com/articles/lyrics-site-genius-com-accuses-google-of-lifting-its-content-11560677400 …
Genius uses community sourcing, like a wiki, for the lyrics. I've edited lyrics on Genius, to fix errors I could spot. I believe they also bootstrapped by scraping lyrics from other sources, like old community forums.
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Here's a the genius banner for "Matthew's Daughter" , a song whose lyrics there I edited to fix a problem. Notice anything missing? Go to the page ... https://genius.com/Beoga-matthews-daughter-lyrics … . Do you ANYWHERE ... ANYWHERE ... see the song writer or publisher credited?pic.twitter.com/AQoq60Jojg
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One of the song-writers in this case was Ed Sheeran. Ed Sheeran! Listing him would probably increase the popularity of that page. So why don't genius list the song-writer? well it might also make it easier for the actual rights owner to find out their words are being copied.
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Fuck that. So anyway, over the years, Genius's site traffic has been going down, because Google now shows lyrics directly in search results. Google, who probably have better lawyers, do at least make an attempt to list the song-writers. For the same song ...pic.twitter.com/AkIESUNgcP
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Genius claims Google has been scraping "its content". I guess in violation of robots.txt or something, because GENIUS DO NOT OWN THIS CONTENT. They didn't even type in the words! Never mind write them.
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They've come up with a clever trick to catch google scraping the genius content, they claim, by stenographically encoding a watermark in the apostrophes. This is a cool PR trick ... but GENIUS DO NOT OWN THIS CONTENT.
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Anyway, I still want a reserve a kick for Google, because they say "We take data quality and creator rights very seriously and hold our licensing partners accountable to the terms of our agreement" ... in that WSJ piece ...
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I have been reporting errors in Google lyrics and attribution for *years* and it does not seem to me like they take that "very seriously" at all. I've seen errors take years to fix, and then get undone, and they still generally credit the wrong people more prominently.
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Neither Van Morrison nor the Chieftains wrote this song; I guarantee it. They are credited twice. This is on Google lyrics.pic.twitter.com/S1KCEqI2KF
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This whole spat is an argument over which parasite should have prime spot on the blood stream.
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End of conversation
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