The US Supreme Court has dismissed a lawsuit from Genius, the self-proclaimed "world's biggest collection of song lyrics and musical knowledge," which accused Google of publishing unsourced and unlicensed lyrics in its search results that were from its archive. The rejection, which occurred yesterday (June 26), basically ensures Google's victory.
Genius was appealing a Court of Appeals dismissal from March 2022. The company argued that the court's decision could enable enterprises like Google to steal aggregated, user-generated content from other websites, but the Solicitor General had recommended that the Supreme Court reject the case earlier this year.
The lawsuit dates back to 2019, when Genius filed for $50 million USD in damages from Google for "misappropriating content" from its website — namely, allegedly lifting lyric transcriptions for millions of songs. Genius claimed that it could prove Google was stealing because the lyrics were "watermarked" by a system of apostrophes, alternating between straight and curled to spell out "RED HANDED" in Morse code when converted to dots and dashes.
Google denied Genius's claim, arguing that it had licensed lyrics in partnership with a Canadian company called LyricFind, which also denied lifting content from Genius. Since the actual ownership of song lyrics remains with artists and publishers, Genius was in trouble when the Court of Appeals ruled that its claim should be treated like a copyright case.
This isn't the first incidence of beef between Genius and Google: when it was then known as RapGenius in 2014, Google punished the website for poor SEO practices by burying its pages in search results.RapGenius was able to return to the top of Google's search results shortly thereafter by removing the offending content, but how the lyric database will fare with the search engine following all of this is yet to be seen.
Genius was appealing a Court of Appeals dismissal from March 2022. The company argued that the court's decision could enable enterprises like Google to steal aggregated, user-generated content from other websites, but the Solicitor General had recommended that the Supreme Court reject the case earlier this year.
The lawsuit dates back to 2019, when Genius filed for $50 million USD in damages from Google for "misappropriating content" from its website — namely, allegedly lifting lyric transcriptions for millions of songs. Genius claimed that it could prove Google was stealing because the lyrics were "watermarked" by a system of apostrophes, alternating between straight and curled to spell out "RED HANDED" in Morse code when converted to dots and dashes.
Google denied Genius's claim, arguing that it had licensed lyrics in partnership with a Canadian company called LyricFind, which also denied lifting content from Genius. Since the actual ownership of song lyrics remains with artists and publishers, Genius was in trouble when the Court of Appeals ruled that its claim should be treated like a copyright case.
This isn't the first incidence of beef between Genius and Google: when it was then known as RapGenius in 2014, Google punished the website for poor SEO practices by burying its pages in search results.