Downright evil seems like a stretch, especially given that Google doesn’t seem to have gotten the lyrics from scraping Genius and rather bought them from a thir

Downright evil seems like a stretch, especially given that Google doesn’t seem to have gotten the lyrics from scraping Genius and rather bought them from a third party who themselves scraped them from Genius. Whether or not Genius blocks googlebot in their robots.txt doesn’t actually seem to be relevant. But this does seem like a good case for the US to introduce “database rights” into copyright law to reward entities that assemble collections of otherwise-disparate information that they don’t own the copyright for, either because someone else does it because it’s something that cannot be copyrighted. Then Genius would have legitimate grounds to sue the third-party that scraped their lyrics. On the other hand, this would also had it existed have allowed Google to sue Bing back when it was first starting for piggybacking on Google’s search results. It’s not obvious to me that database rights are a good idea.