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Ask HN: Is my Idea profitable? Hint: semantic web crawler for lyrics | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is my Idea profitable? Hint: semantic web crawler for lyrics

3 points·alanchavez··5 comments

Hey HN!

I was recently exposed to CasperJS and PhantomJS and I'm fascinated with these tools.

Last night I didn't sleep because I built a web crawler that crawls lyrics websites, and matches the lyrics to user generated content in songmeanings.com and lyricinterpretation.com.

Why? Because let's say I want to look for songs about socialization of government, my program is able to say:

"AWOLNATION - Jump on my shoulders"

My question is... is this a profitable idea?

Profitable? Yes. You could profit very well from it. But finding out how, exactly, is the bigger challenge.

You'll get sued: http://usatoday30.usatoday.com/tech/products/cnet/2007-08-17...

So if I crawl lyrics website, am I violating their copyright?

I'm not displaying the lyrics, I'm just matching lyrics with user generated content to come up with song recommendations.

I'm not a lawyer, but Google is doing the same and many other companies too. They never get sued, Google even caches your entire site without asking explicitly. The archive.org Project even copies to whole internet and luckily get's away with it.

Other than that, I'm avid when it comes to Ontologic, Semantic, Neurologic or Stochastic systems and would like to tell you that simply using Semantics wil not lead to a working solution.

Short answer, no. I would think it falls into that categoery of "cool ideas"

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