Google Wins Court Battle with Genius over Song Lyrics

Google has once again prevailed in an ongoing legal battle with the song lyrics website Genius. Back in 2019, Genius claimed that Google was using its transcribed lyrics without permission in search results.

Genius has a large database of song lyrics, and considers itself as “the world’s biggest music encyclopedia.” It tried to demonstrate that Google was scraping info from its website by putting watermarks on its lyrics. It then appeared in Google searches but without any link back or attribution to Genius.

Google Wins Court Battle with Genius over Song Lyrics

Google said that it did not “crawl or scrape websites to source” song lyrics. Canadian lyrics licensing site LyricFind, also a defendant in the Genius lawsuit, licenses its lyric transcriptions to Google.

Judge Margo Brodie ruled in August 2020 that while Genius’ claims of scraping appeared credible, they didn’t constitute a copyright violation since Genius isn’t the actual copyright holder of the lyrics, which she said belonged to the musicians who wrote them. Genius licenses the lyrics, adding to them through derivative works such as annotations, but Brodie said that didn’t give Genius ownership over the actual lyrics themselves.

On Thursday, a three-judge panel in the 2nd Circuit affirmed the earlier decision. They said that the lyrics are protected by copyrights that Genius doesn’t own.

See Also: Google’s CTO envisions more sales of tablets than laptops

Source: The Verge