Google accused of copying content from third-party site

Jun 17, 2019 09:56 GMT  ·  By

Search giant Google is being accused by lyrics website Genius.com that it copied its content to power the Lyrics OneBox on the Google search engine results page.

This feature allows users searching for lyrics for a specific song to get them right on the results page in a dedicated box that doesn’t require loading an additional website.

While Google says it’s working with LyricFind in this regard, Genius.com claims that it discovered the search company was copying its content after implementing a hidden watermarking system.

“Over the last two years, we’ve shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius,” Ben Gross, Genius’s chief strategy officer, is quoted as saying by WSJ.

First violation discovered in 2017

According to the same report, Genius.com, which claims it first notified Google of the infringement back in 2017, used alternating straight and curved apostrophes in its lyrics for the creation of a hidden Morse code that speed out the words “Red Handed.”

But on the other hand, Google says the content that shows up in this information panels are is provided by third-party licensed companies.

“We take data quality and creator rights very seriously and hold our licensing partners accountable to the terms of our agreement,” Google said adding than an investigation is under way.

LyricFind, the company that Google is working with for providing lyrics on the search engine results page, claims it doesn’t steal content from Genius.com.

“We do not source lyrics from Genius,” LyricFind Chief Executive Darryl Ballantyne explained.

The partnership between Google and Canadian-based LyricFind was announced in 2016, but in a statement for The Verge, the search company explains that “the information in search results are licensed from various sources.”