A new tech content creation company, Genius Media, has accused Google of copying its song lyrics for use in search results.
According to a Wall Street Journal report, this is adversely affecting traffic to its site. An independent lookup of a song on Google Search would show a box alongside general search results that shows the lyrics for that track. This means that people don’t need to go to the sites for lyrics any more
Genius seems to have evidence of this accusation as it has a clever way of finding copycats.
According to another report by 9to5Google, Genius made a change to its site back in 2016 where it started “alternating the lyrics’ apostrophes between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song.” This effectively acts as a watermark for the copy, and when the apostrophes are translated into morse code, it spells out “Red Handed.”
It started in 2016, when Genius got exclusive access to the lyrics for hit song “Panda” by Desiigner. That meant their rendition was spot on while lyrics at most other places were strewn with errors and miscues. That is, except for Google.
“We noticed that Google’s lyrics matched our lyrics down to the character,” Dan Gross, Genius’ chief strategy officer, told the Journal in an email.
Apparently, Genius found over 100 different instances of this happening on various songs.
Google has apparently been notified multiple times over the past two years by Genius regarding the “stolen” song lyrics. The company explained that the lyrics were licensed from partners and after the initial report was published, Google issued a statement saying that it was going to investigate the issue and terminate agreements with any of those partners who were “not upholding good practices.” So technically, Google isn’t directly at fault in this case, but Genius’ past notices probably should have triggered an investigation far sooner than this.
The Alphabet company is not new to these sorts of accusations however and some within the company are definitely wondering why a company this loaded with cash still will not let the smaller players just have their time in the sun. If the reports prove to be true (I suspect they will with the usual out of court settlement occurring), these occurrences keep painting a company unknowingly drunk with power. Does David beat a Goliath with tanks and AK-47’S? I doubt it.
Increasingly, Google is trying to provide users with as much information as possible on the search page — convenient for users who don’t want to click onto a website, but bad news for websites that depend on those clicks. Genius, of course, does not own the copyright to the lyrics it publishes. The musicians do. That means it may have tough luck taking its complaints and evidence to court to hold Google or its partners accountable.
These sorts of lawsuits are just great fodder for the politicians — most notably Elizabeth Warren — who want to break up big tech as a scalp so big would be too delicious for her base who are dying to see the tech titans bleed out their ‘stolen cash’ any means possible. As this incident shows, companies such as Google, Facebook, and Amazon have the power to hurt smaller competition with a few design tweaks.
