[mcny]

Level1Techs "link show" (because we can't call it news anymore) kind of touched this topic. I would like to read what you guys make of this:

> Supreme Court rejects Genius lawsuit claiming Google stole song lyrics SCOTUS won't overturn ruling that US copyright law preempts Genius' claim.

> The song lyrics website Genius' allegations that Google "stole" its work in violation of a contract will not be heard by the US Supreme Court. The top US court denied Genius' petition for certiorari in an order list issued today, leaving in place lower-court rulings that went in Google's favor.

> Genius previously lost rulings in US District Court for the Eastern District of New York and the US Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit. In August 2020, US District Judge Margo Brodie ruled that Genius' claim is preempted by the US Copyright Act. The appeals court upheld the ruling in March 2022.

> "Plaintiff's argument is, in essence, that it has created a derivative work of the original lyrics in applying its own labor and resources to transcribe the lyrics, and thus, retains some ownership over and has rights in the transcriptions distinct from the exclusive rights of the copyright owners... Plaintiff likely makes this argument without explicitly referring to the lyrics transcriptions as derivative works because the case law is clear that only the original copyright owner has exclusive rights to authorize derivative works," Brodie wrote in the August 2020 ruling.

> Google search results routinely display song lyrics via the service LyricFind. Genius alleged that LyricFind copied Genius transcriptions and licensed them to Google.

> Brodie found that Genius' claim must fail even if one accepts the argument that it "added a separate and distinct value to the lyrics by transcribing them such that the lyrics are essentially derivative works." Since Genius "does not allege that it received an assignment of the copyright owners' rights in the lyrics displayed on its website, Plaintiff's claim is preempted by the Copyright Act because, at its core, it is a claim that Defendants created an unauthorized reproduction of Plaintiff's derivative work, which is itself conduct that violates an exclusive right of the copyright owner under federal copyright law," Brodie wrote.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/06/supreme-court-re...

[rcxdude]

The basic idea is whether an unauthorised derivative work is itself entitled to copyright protection: could the creator of the derivative work prevent copying by the original creator (or anyone else) of the work on which it is based, even though they themselves have no permission to distribute it? (if the work is authorised, this is generally considered to be the case). It looks like from this the conclusion is 'no', at the very least in this case. I'm not sure this matches most people's moral intuitions: every now and again a big company includes some fan art in their own official release without permission (usually not as a result of a general policy, but because of someone getting lazy and the rest of the system failing to catch it), and generally speaking the reaction is negative.

[joshuaissac]

> whether an unauthorised derivative work is itself entitled to copyright protection

That is not what this court case was about. Genius had already settled the case of unauthorised transcriptions and had bought licences for its lyrics after a lawsuit 2014, so its own work was no longer unauthorised. In the case cited above, Genius was trying to enforce its claims against Google via contract law rather than copyright law. The court ruled that the alleged violations were covered by copyright law, so they could only pursued via copyright law, and that only the copyright holder (or assignee) of the lyrics that were copied could sue Google under it.