Genius files lawsuit against Google after allegedly catching lyrics theft

Google is finding itself in hot water recently. The lyric-annotation site Genius Media is suing Google and its licensed lyric company Lyric Find for $50 million.

Genius filed the lawsuit and alleges that they caught Google “red-handed” stealing their content in June due to a rather clever trick typed into their lyrics  Read more about the lawsuit and legal words below.

Read More: Halsey, Bring Me The Horizon collab didn’t make ‘Manic’—here’s why

Genius’ main points in the lawsuit are that Google misappropriates their content and leads those searching towards Google related feeds.

” Google has designed its lyrics Information Box in a way that discourages users from seeking another result, and, in many cases, directs them toward other revenue-generating Google products.” the lawsuit states.

The Information box that Genuis is referring to is shown below.

Google
[Photo via Google
In Layman’s terms, Genius is saying that Google steals lyrics from original sites and puts those into this information box. The box then displays most of the lyrics and pulls users away from the original site’s content. See for yourself. It takes some rather significant scrolling to reach any non-Google related site when searching for lyrics.

Genius accused Google and LyricFind of doing this earlier in the year and both denied the claim outright. So, Genius came up with a clever way to catch Google in the act.

Genius coded out a digital watermark that alternates apostrophes in lyrics between straight and curly ones. Besides being well geniuses, Genius also has a sense of humor. When converted to Morse Code, the apostrophes spell out “red-handed.”

Read More: FEVER 333 announce first signing to 333 WRECKORDS CREW label

After notifying Google that they had found these watermarks in the Google Information boxes, representatives said they were looking into the issue. Genius attempted to see the spread of the issue. So, they applied the watermark to 271 songs and that appeared in Google’s info box between October and December of 2018. 43% “showed clear evidence of matching” the watermark, according to the complaint.

“Given the fact that most lyrics are transcribed after listening to the sound recording, it is highly unlikely that another source of lyrics would be a character-for-character match—including punctuation, contractions, and line breaks—with lyrics appearing on Genius’s website, without having been copied from Genius’s website.” The lawsuit states.

Google is already facing scrutiny over its treatment towards competitors and this is just another incident of that. The full lawsuit can be found here.

What do you think about the lawsuit? Tell us in the comments below.

See more: The 11 most punk films of all time

[envira-gallery id=”195377″]