June 26th 2023.
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday declined to hear Genius's appeal of a lower court's decision to block its breach-of-contract claims against Google. The website had accused Google of misusing its transcripts of song lyrics in search engine results without a license.
Genius argued that a win for Google would give big tech companies the ability to steal content from websites like Reddit, eBay, and Wikipedia that aggregate user-generated information. Google denied this allegation, with spokesperson Jose Castaneda saying that the company "licenses lyrics on Google Search from third parties, and we do not crawl or scrape websites to source lyrics."
Josh Rosenkranz, a lawyer for Genius, expressed his and the company's disappointment with the Supreme Court's decision, saying that the lower court's ruling "allows companies like Google to swallow up their competitors by misappropriating their content without any repercussions".
Genius alleged that Google copied and posted its lyrics transcripts at the top of search results without permission, leading web traffic away from the Genius site. To prove their case, they cited songs by rappers Desiigner and Kendrick Lamar, as well as pop singers Selena Gomez and Alessia Cara, which Genius claimed to have caught Google copying through the use of watermarks. Moreover, they said they included a distinctive pattern of curly and straight apostrophes in transcriptions for some new songs that spelled out “RED HANDED” in Morse code. Genius claimed to have caught Google in the act.
Google argued that Genius was trying to "ignore the true copyright owners and invent new rights through a purported contract". President Joe Biden's administration recommended in May that the justices turn down the appeal. In the end, the court declined to hear the case.
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