In June 2019, lyric annotation site Genius accused Google of canceling its published texts without permission. Later that year, Genius filed a lawsuit against Google and Canadian lyric sourcing company LyricFind for a minimum of $ 50 million for alleged misuse of content on Genius’ website. Now, the lawsuit has been dismissed, as well Variation reports.
According to Variation, Federal Judge of New York, Judge Margo K. Brodie, site with Google and LyricFind, argue that since Genius does not have the rights to the original texts, the company does not have the legal state to file the lawsuit. The suit was eventually dismissed because of Genius’ “failure of a claim”, as Brodie reported in her statement.
Accusations of Genius were first revealed in a Wall Street Journal report in June 2019. Genius claimed to have discovered the alleged misuse of Google content through its watermark, which the company ended up setting up around 2016. The watermark causes apostrophes in texts to alternate between straight and curly single quotation marks (‘and’) in the same sequence for each song. When the two types of apostrophes are converted into dots and dashes, they spell “red hands” in Morse code.
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