Song Lyrics Sites Acting as Parisites

Back in 1995 or so the old Canadian comedy group Radio Free Vestibule (I've not officially accepted their name change to ‘The Vestibules’ because I think ‘Radio Free Vestibule’ is funnier.) put out a video for their song “The Grunge Song”. If you don't know the song than I probably wasn't using it as a stick to beat your Nirvana-loving ass with during the mid 90s.

Anyway, it's about the funniest thing they've ever done, unless, like me you have a soft spot for Zalgon 26 McGee (video/realplayer). I can't find a full version of the song on the Web, just clips that don't include enough of it to be funny (including a cover by the Austin Lounge Lizards.. weird.) So you're going to have to go and find it yourself.

In my searching, I found that every single song lyrics site that came up mis-attributed the song to Weezer. This is a good test case to show how the hundreds of song lyrics sites must act as one huge cesspool of parisitic behaviour, stealing content from one another continually until every song on every site is mirrored on every other site. So now everyone thinks Phish covered “Gin and Juice” because one dork on Napster didn't know who The Gourds were, and now because of lyrics sites we're getting the same thing again.

I wonder if it's possible to further 'poison' these already unusable and virus-ridden lyrics sites by sabotaging even more of their content? Does this dark side of the web already work on some kind of reputation system to filter out bad content while maximizing the ability to gather desired information?

Perhaps a hostile environment is the only effective testbed for such a system. Friendly and self-boosting bloggers will rush to adopt the latest social-software doodad and not think to try and put it through its paces security-wise. Hence the plague of spam comments and even entire spam blogs clogging up technorati and other aggregators. Bloggers are a soft, pink lot, to be sure.

Still holding out for Web 2.1.