Genius is one of the most popular song lyrics websites out there. Users (and even the artists themselves) can comment on the verses of the songs and indicate their meaning or anecdotes of their composition that the rest of the community will vote on. In addition, they stand behind Spotify’s texts in real time for those who, among other things, provide content
Genius has unsuccessfully sued Google for displaying its text in search results before linking to the page itself
The website filed a lawsuit against Google in December 2019, accusing the company of using its content. When searching for the lyrics of a song, Google often shows the full lyrics right before the search results that lead to other pages, e.g. B. Genius.
In Genius, they found that the letter that Google displayed in the search results came directly from a dedicated page. They noticed this including, Use Morse Code with punctuation markswho have favourited The words “RED HANDED” in your letters. This made it easy to show that Google had copied and pasted the Genius content when the lyrics of a song came up after a search.
When Google found they’d been caught, they told Genius that they would give up the practice, but shortly after they got back to their old habits (and were rediscovered using the same method), it convinced the lyrics website to sue the Giants.
The problem is that Genius has sued Google for copyright infringement, but the site does not own the copyright to the lyrics it saves because they belong to singers and record labels. Genius is only licensed to display its texts. Because of this legal nuance when making the claim Genius had to see the case dismissed.