The thing is that the value in this case is not in the lyrics themselves but in the transcription and compilation into a central database. The people looking them up already have a copy - they are listening to the song. A transcription is something they could do themselves if they wanted to put in the effort.
From a maximalist perspective you are quite correct. But from the perspective of how much the publication affects the market for the lyrics I think it is reasonable to conclude that at worst the impact is marginal and in the vast majority of cases it has none at all.
I just do not understand it?
If the officially licensed rightsholders of those lyrics would like to also make a site, so be it, but it seems they are a bit late to the party.
This rationale would prevent providing a cast list for a movie, because you're publishing the casting agent's work without paying them anything.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When I search for, say, [joy division atrocity exhibition lyrics], I get 10 generic lyrics sites as my first page of Google results. But what I really want is to get a result more like this: http://www.joydiv.org/shadowplay/joyd/atrocity.html
Besides not being piled up with ads, those fan-curated sites typically have fewer spelling errors, actually attribute lyrics to specific versions of a song and note variations, etc. Of course, in the cases where I already know a good fan site, I can either go directly, or do a site: search in Google. But in other cases I have to click through pages of this junk.
Rap Genius Co-Founder Ilan Zechory said his New York company had not heard from the NMPA, "but we can't wait to have a conversation with them about how all writers can participate in and benefit from the Rap Genius knowledge project."
