Google wins court battle with Genius over song lyrics

Google has as soon as once more prevailed in an ongoing authorized battle with music lyrics web site Genius, which claimed that Google was utilizing its transcribed lyrics with out permission in search outcomes.

Genius sued Google in 2019, arguing that Google was scraping lyrics from its web site in violation of Genius’ copyright. Genius has a big database of music lyrics, and payments itself as “the world’s greatest music encyclopedia.” It tried to reveal that Google was scraping data from its web site by placing watermarks on its lyrics, which it stated then appeared in Google searches however with none hyperlink again or attribution to Genius.

Google stated in a weblog publish on the time that it didn’t “crawl or scrape web sites to supply” music lyrics. Canadian lyrics licensing website LyricFind, additionally a defendant within the Genius lawsuit, licenses its lyric transcriptions to Google.

Decide Margo Brodie dominated in August 2020 that whereas Genius’ claims of scraping appeared credible, they didn’t represent a copyright violation since Genius isn’t the precise copyright holder of the lyrics, which she stated belonged to the musicians who wrote them. Genius licenses the lyrics, including to them by by-product works corresponding to annotations, however Brodie stated that didn’t give Genius possession over the precise lyrics themselves.

On Thursday, a three-judge panel within the 2nd Circuit affirmed the sooner choice, writing that the lyrics are protected by copyrights that Genius doesn’t personal.