Once again, Google has prevailed in an ongoing legal battle with song lyric website Genius, which claimed that Google was using its transcribed lyrics without permission in search results.
Genius sued Google in 2019, arguing that Google was extracting lyrics from its website in violation of Genius’s copyright. Genius has a large database of song lyrics and bills itself as “the world’s largest music encyclopedia.” He tried to prove that Google was extracting information from his website by placing watermarks on his lyrics, which then appeared in Google searches, but without any link or attribution to Genius.
Google said in a blog post at the time he didn’t “crawl or scrape websites to find” song lyrics. Canadian lyric-licensing site LyricFind, also a defendant in the Genius lawsuit, licenses its lyric transcriptions to Google.
Judge Margo Brodie ruled in August 2020 that while Genius’ claims about the scratching seemed credible, they did not constitute copyright infringement as Genius is not the actual copyright holder of the lyrics, which he said belonged to the musicians who wrote them. Genius licenses the lyrics, adding them through derivative works such as annotations, but Brodie said that didn’t give Genius ownership over the lyrics themselves.
On Thursday, a three-judge panel in the Second Circuit upheld the earlier decision, writing that the lyrics are protected by copyright that Genius does not own.