Last year, the lyrics were web service Genius Submitted by Google claimed that the tech giant had ripped his transcripts for display in their own lucrative search results. It seemed to be an open matter. Thanks to some bad watermarks, it turned out that Google was hit dead to rights in the lyrical theft. But on Monday, the Copyright Act got in the way of Genius’ lawsuits.
After it began to suspect that Google was overcoming the need for anyone to visit its website, Genius decided to include some digital brands in its texts, including one spelled “redhanded” in Morse code. Those watermarks appeared in Google’s search results, and Genius Media Group went on to file a complaint with numerous Google examples that stole the transcripts. For its part, Google has refused to comply with any deletion practices and pointed to the fact that it uses third parties to collect texts if they are not provided directly by the publisher. One of those third parties, LyricFind, was a co-suspect in Genius’ complaint, and he admitted in a blogpost that it can have “without having conscious genius texts from another location.”
Months later, the decision came in, and U.S. Judge Judge Margo Brodie decided to dismiss the case altogether.
Judge Brodie’s order does not claim that Google is not guilty of transcripts of Genius; instead, it undermines the shaky legal basis of the lawsuit itself. The primary problem is that, because Genius has licensed the publishing rights to song lyrics, it can not really claim that Google infringes its copyright. The problem that Genius raises is that it spends a lot of money on transcribing texts after going through the proper licensing channels. It believes Google is stealing that money and labor by scrapping.
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This is where a bundle of legal and jurisdictional crap came into play, and the bottom line is that Genius had to go with a claim that Google wrote its terms of service.
Judge Brodie wrote in her order that the Copyright Act, which is the sole jurisdiction of the federal courts, prevents any infringement of contractual claims and that what Genius seeks to protect can be classified as a derivative work. The judge writes that, “at its core, it is an allegation that defendants have made an unauthorized reproduction of the plaintiff’s derivative work, which is itself conduct that infringes an exclusive right of the owner of copyright under federal copyright. . ” Because breach of contract claims is made under ordinary New York law and California law, and Brodie finds that the Copyright Act makes these specific claims in advance, they are null and void.
Genius also accused Google of participating in unfair competition, another allegation that initially appears to be a slam dunk. Eventually, most people will search for texts first through Google, and Genius hopes to be the search link the user chooses to get all of them p-word-packed Nicki Minaj lines. Search is incredibly important to Genius, because it ironically proved back in 2013 when it was penalized by Google for violating guidelines for seeking to increase the rank of Genius.
In the view of Genius, Google represents the clicks and labor that went into creating content for its website. But in the opinion of Judge Brodie, copyright law still overrides the essential unfairness of the practices alleged by Google.
Does this mean that Genius has lost and Google is free to steal any text it wants? Not exactly. It simply means that Genius in the eyes of the court did not make a convincing legal argument for this particular attack. Genie did not immediately return Gizmodo’s request for comment. Instead of commenting on the matter, Google just pointed us to an old one blogpost from last year on how it sources lyrical transcriptions.
This is not the end of Genius, and Google has no intention of stealing texts in the future, at least not consciously. But it raises the question of whether any party wants to oppose the law and go full throne with clones of transcripts of Genius. Based on Monday’s ruling, that seems possible, as long as the cunningly hypothetical person who does it manages to get the right publishing licenses – something that Genius famously did not when it was first erected.
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