How My Show Hacker News Project Got Acquired After 6 Months (18 minute read)
Josh Howarth found it 100 times easier to bootstrap a profitable online business if you ride recent big market trends, for example, podcast hosting or remote work. There was a lack of tools to find topics to plug into Google Trends, so Howarth decided to build one for himself. He marketed through Twitter, building an email list, and eventually launched on Hacker News. After some initial success, Howarth started focusing on making the product more robust and sustainable for the long term, and to monetize the product. After a few months of working on the code, with no extra marketing efforts, an offer was made to Howarth to acquire his product. With the acquisition, Howarth no longer needed to worry about customer acquisition and marketing, and could focus entirely on building a quality product.
Genius sues Google over allegedly stolen song lyrics (2 minute read)
Genius is suing Google for $50 million in damages, accusing the company of knowingly copying song lyrics and displaying them in search results. Google will sometimes display song lyrics that are provided by partners. Genius says that some of these lyrics were stolen off its website. A clever watermarking scheme was used by Genius to mark the content that it owned. The site used alternating straight and curved apostrophes to prove that Google was copying its content. Genius alleges that Google has been copying its lyrics for many years. Both Genius and Google hold licenses from music publishers to print song lyrics. Web scraping is not illegal, and since both parties have licenses to display the content, it might not be illegal for Google to display the copied lyrics.