CNET’s Elinor Mills has a great piece about sites republishing song lyrics and making money from Google text ads. She details the plight of Alexander Perls Rousmaniere - a Los Angeles Artist who is losing money to sites reusing his lyrics without permission.

The chief villains are the shifty sites reusing the lyrics, but the article goes a step further by pointing out the lucrative role of search engines:

“Google is selling advertising on all the big copyright-infringing lyric Web sites,” Rousmaniere said. “It may seem like small potatoes, but lyrics are a huge search term on the Internet–these sites (and Google) are probably pulling in hundreds of thousands of dollars monthly, all on the back of copyrighted material.”

Google takes a lot of copyright “heat”, but it is not the only search engine to profit from unauthorized use of copyrighted material — and consider the size of the “dirty” money when you include the ad networks who serve display ads on these pages and the sites hosting the content in the first place.

It is an intricate plot that needs to be sorted out before publishers and content creators like Rousmaniere lose incentive to put their original content online.