Google wins legal battle over song lyrics copyright

Google has won a legal battle against song lyrics platform Genius that claimed that the tech giant used its transcribed lyrics without permission in Search results.

According to The Verge, a three-judge panel affirmed the earlier decision, saying that the lyrics are protected by copyrights that Genius doesn't own.

Genius had sued Google in 2019, arguing that Google was scraping lyrics from its website in violation of Genius' copyright.

The lawsuit claimed that Google was scraping info from its website by putting watermarks on its lyrics, which then appeared in Google searches without any attribution to Genius.

Google then said that it always strives to uphold high standards of conduct for itself and from the partners we work with.

"Music publishers often don't have digital copies of the lyrics text. In these cases, we -- like music streaming services and other companies -- license the lyrics text from third parties," the company said.

"We do not crawl or scrape websites to source these lyrics. The lyrics that you see in information boxes on Search come directly from lyrics content providers, and they are updated automatically as we receive new lyrics and corrections on a regular basis," it added.

To help make it clearer where the lyrics come from, Google started including attribution to the third party providing the digital lyrics text.

A judge had ruled in August 2020 that while Genius' claims of scraping appeared credible, they didn't constitute a copyright violation since Genius isn't the actual copyright holder of the lyrics.