Google publishes lyrics directly in search pages: if you type a song title into Google, you'll get a box that includes the its lyrics, alongside the usual search results. It's a useful tool, but one company that specializes in song lyrics, Genius Media, says that Google has been copying their lyrics for years for its search results.
A report from the Wall Street Journal this weekend brings to light an accusation against Google. Genius Media says it has "irrefutable" evidence that Google is copying its song lyrics for use in search results.
The company has accused Google of not only hurting its traffic with its lyrics cards, but of sometimes grabbing Genius' lyrics verbatim. The evidence is in the apostrophes, Genius said. It purposefully alternated between straight and curved apostrophes as a form of watermarking (they typically spell out "red handed" in Morse code), and there were reportedly over 100 instances where Google's lyrics included those exact apostrophes.
"Over the last two years, we've shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius in their Lyrics OneBox," Genius' Chief Strategy Officer Ben Gross said in a statement. "This is a serious issue, and Google needs to address it."
Google denied stealing any lyrics. Instead, it claimed, the lyrics that show up in the "information panels" that pop up in a Google search are from licensed partners. Genius, however, says it found more than 100 examples of Google taking its content.
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.
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. Whether or not Genius' complaint has merit, it's coming at a bad time for Google.
