Google Will Cite The Lyrics Sources After The Dispute With Genius

Indira Datta - Jul 10, 2019

Genius Media lyrics site alleged Google of copying and reposting its song lyrics on the search page. Later, Google officially voiced about the matter.

Last month, Genius Media lyrics site alleged Google of copying and reposting its song lyrics on the search page. Later, the tech giant officially voiced about the matter.

Genius-accused-Google-of-using-its-lyrics-on-search-pages-1 — Genius accused Google of using its lyrics on search pages

According to Google, the lyrics displayed on its search page provided by LyricFind. It has also set to work with the company to conduct an investigation into this issue in order to ensure they comply with the rules. Besides, the company will start showing lyrics providers on its search results page.

Since 2016, Genius started to find lyrics providers that copied its song lyrics without citing its source. The company initially made contracts with music publishers, allowing them to repost lyrics on its site as they are its copyrighted property and songwriters must be paid if other parties wanted to repost the lyrics. It then made profits by providing lyrics and their annotations to firms like Spotify.

It was theorized by Genius that many companies might be copying their lyrics. Therefore, it gave apostrophes a special formatting sequence. According to the evidence, Genius accused that Google used its lyrics on the search results page.

Chief strategy officer at Genius, Ben Gross, aid to the Wall Street Journal that:

Genius-secretly-marked-the-lyrics-on-its-website-with-various-alternate-apostrophe-patterns-3 — Genius secretly marked the lyrics on its website with various alternate apostrophe patterns

In 2016, Google partnered with LyricFind to put lyrics displayed directly on its search page. Therefore, the tech giant confirmed that they did not take the lyrics from Genius's site. Besides, Google buys song lyrics from publishers and has a separate database to check copyrights in other lyrics websites. Maybe, LyricFind accidentally used Genius's lyrics to post on the Google search page. But the company did not say that it deliberately did it.

Although the truth is still not clear, all evidence shows that Google is denying the accusation. In the near future, the company will show the company that provides the lyrics on its search page. Thus, any lyrics provider has problems with the lyrics data in its search result pages, they can easily find the responsible party directly.