On Tuesday, Google filed a lawsuit over the alleged deletion of Genius’ lyrics, a lyrics and commentary site. A federal judge in the eastern district of New York found that while the claims of deletion were credible, the deletion was not a copyright infringement, and the lawsuit was dismissed as a result.
Genius claimed in December 2019 that Google would cancel their texts. The deletion was demonstrated by slamming a clever text watermark into the entries of Genius’ texts, in one case with a series of apostrophes to spell “red hands” in Morse code. The watermark appeared later in related Google searches, without any link or attribution to Genius.
Earlier that year, Google published a blog post stating that the company “does not crawl or scrape web pages to source these texts. Instead, the company claims through its blog post that texts that people pass through information boxes” come directly from text content providers, and they are updated automatically as we regularly receive new texts and corrections. “
Judge Margo Brodie ruled that despite Genius’ claims, the website is not the actual copyright holder, according to The Hollywood Reporter. Although Genius users have collected the lyrics, the lyrics themselves are still among the musicians who wrote them. While Genius effectively frees the texts, and adds to them through derivative works (e.g. annotations), Genius does not give the necessary ownership over the actual texts themselves.
“[The] infringement of contractual claims is nothing more than claims that seek to protect the exclusive rights of the copyright holders against protection against unauthorized reproduction of the texts, ‘Brodie wrote in her dismissal.
Brodie went on to say that the breach of contract argument is also preceded by the Copyright Act, noting that it’s a claim that [Google] made an unauthorized reproduction of [Genius’] derivative work, which is itself conduct that infringes an exclusive right of the copyright owner under federal copyright law. ”
However, Genius is not the first website to accuse Google of deleting data for Google’s own pages. Yelp has long accused Google of stealing its content on search – something that was raised at a recent anti-trust hearing attended by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Yelp has previously claimed that Google has refused clicks from its website for Google’s own feed. During the hearing, the rep asked. David Cicilline (D-RI) Pichai as he believed this was anti-competitive behavior.
“When I run the business, I’m really focused on giving users what they want,” Pichai replied, evading the question somewhat. “We lead ourselves to the highest standard.”
