Genius has lost a lawsuit against Google alleging that the Big G stole texts from their site.
The music company claims to have evidence that Google deleted its lyrics and displayed them in search results, thanks to a clever mix of digital watermarks and Morse code.
Following the suspicion that Google wrote his transcripts, Genius added a new watermark to his texts, swapping the original apostrophes for a specific sequence of curly and straight apostrophes. When the straight apostrophes were interpreted as dots, and the curly apostrophes were interpreted as stripes, the pattern spelled a single word in Morse code: “red-handed.”
If the pattern was found outside of Genius’ website, the company believed it would have unreliable evidence that its texts were copied. Over the next few months, Genius said it sometimes tracked the watermark in Google’s box information boxes. In May 2017, it asked the tech giant for answers.
[Read: This AI wrote such emo lyrics that humans thought it was My Chemical Romance]
Genie said Google never explained the problem. In response, the site embedded the watermark in a random sample of new songs on the platform, and searched the texts on Google every day. Genie claims that the search giant provided information boxes for 90% of the watermark songs, of which 43% matched the pattern.
According to the suit, Google said that the source of the transcript was LyricFind, a Canada-based lyric licensing company, and that all the text was obtained through licenses instead of scraping. Genie claims that the watermark then disappeared from Google’s information boxes.
Failing that Google was still copying its texts, Genius added a new watermark to its texts. This one created a pattern that spelled “Genie” in Morse code. After spotting the new watermark in Google’s lyric boxes, Genius sued Big G and LyricFind for at least $ 50 million in damage.
But the stunned plan did not convince the courts. On Monday, a federal judge ruled that Genius could not prosecute the companies because it did not have the rights over the original texts. Instead, the site simply uses a license to publish the texts.
The judge also dismissed Genius’ claims that deleting his texts was a breach of contract because they were not “qualitatively different from federal claims for copyright,” Variety reports.
Unhappy genius. Whatever you think of the lawsuit, you should give them some props for the watermarking mess.
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Published August 12, 2020 – 13:42 UTC
