Music-annotation website Genius is accusing Google of stealing lyrics from its website and publishing them in search results.
Genius is a Brooklyn-based company that transcribes and analyzes lyrics from popular songs on its website. It said Google (GOOGL)
has been stealing the lyrics of some songs for the past few years, thus
breaking Genius' terms of service and siphoning off traffic.
The Wall Street Journal,
which first reported the news, said that a Genius employee noticed the
first instance in 2016. Rapper Desiigner's song "Panda" had
hard-to-decipher lyrics. So, the company had the rapper transcribe the
song for them -- and then Genius saw their version being displayed on
Google.
To show that Google was
allegedly doing this, developers at Genius alternated the lyrics'
apostrophes between straight and curly styles in a targeted way:
When
the apostrophes were converted into Morse code, it spelled out the
phrase "red handed," the newspaper said. Genius said it notified Google
first in 2017 and as recently as April about the practice.
https://cnn.it/2INIpba
