In a weird way, it would seem that every song on RapGenius starts off nearly naked of annotation, and — it would seem — essentially illegal, but may end up heavily annotated and “transformative.”

You can’t start at the end, though.

One is reminded of mathematical induction. Somehow, though, I don’t expect the law to agree that because lyrics-prime is a legal, transformative work, that lesser-annotated copies are therefore also legal. IANAL