Google caught 'red handed' by lyrics site Genius for allegedly stealing its traffic

Popular lyrics site Genius.com has accused Google of stealing its traffic by displaying lyrics supposedly belonging to the site in Google Search information panels. Apparently, Genius had notified Google of the same in 2017 and again in April this year. In an email message to The Wall Street Journal, Chief Strategy Officer of Genius, Ben Gross said,

Over the last two years, we’ve shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius."

The "irrefutable evidence" that Gross is alluding to refers to Genius's watermarking system in the lyrics using apostrophes that the company first started implementing in 2016. The company uses alternating forms of straight and curly single-quote apostrophes (see image below) in the exact same sequence for every song. Upon converting these apostrophes into Morse code, they spell "Red Handed". 

Google said that the lyrics showing up in the search information panels are licensed from partners such as LyricFind and are not Google-created. Since the needed lyrics show up in Google information panels, users do not take the trouble of clicking on the original publisher leading to drop in site traffic. Sources for Genius's revenues include ads, sponsored videos, and licensing agreements with Spotify and Apple Music. 

Google also said that it would review its licensing agreements with partners and terminate those "not upholding good practices." LyricFind on its part said that it creates the lyrics in-house and does not source them from Genius.

Genius's doubts about Google's lyrics source began in 2016 when a software engineer noticed that the lyrics of the song "Panda" by rapper Desiigner was exactly the same in Google as was on Genius. Panda had hard-to-understand lyrics and many other sites got the words wrong with the exception of Genius because Desiigner himself provided the lyrics transcript to the site. 

It remains to be seen how Genius and Google would sort this out. Genius itself does not hold any lyrics copyrights so any legal argument, if taken to court, might stand to be considerably weaker.