Until a few years ago Genius, an American site that allows you to add notes and comments to the contents of other sites, wanted to change the way we use the internet. For some time its objectives have been reduced, and today it aspires only to be the reference site for those who want to deepen the more complex musical texts: such as hip hop ones, particularly suitable for annotation. However, there is an obstacle between the current situation and its ambitions: Google.
For two years, Genius has accused Google of copying the texts that appear on Genius, and then showing them in the search results screens. In this way, users who search for the lyrics of the songs remain on Google and do not continue on Genius, with a consequent loss of visits (and therefore of revenue) for the site. The first letter with which Genius accused Google of stealing its contents dates back to 2017 while the last, sent in April and read by the Wall Street Journal, contains the threat to report Google's behavior to the American antitrust agency: Genius claims in fact that the search engine violates copyright and competition laws, because it exploits third party content to strengthen its dominant position on the market (Google denies any responsibility).
The diatribe between Genius and Google anticipates a problem that will be increasingly relevant in the future, linked to the management of copyright content by large American multinationals. For some time now, more and more search engines and social networks have been trying to keep users on their sites for as long as possible, in order to submit to them an increasing share of advertisements. The expedient they use is to provide a series of contents – almost always aggregated elsewhere – that meet the main user searches, such as weather forecasts, football match results and song lyrics (if you use Google, you will have noticed). According to a consultancy firm contacted by the Wall Street Journal, in March 2019 62 percent of searches made on Google from a mobile device ended on Google, i.e. without the user having clicked on another site.
To collect and manage this type of content, Google relies on external companies, which in turn should reward the copyright holders. In the case of Genius, however, it did not happen, although the evidence of plagiarism is quite evident.
It all started in 2016, when Genius realized that the lyrics of the song “Panda” by rapper Desiigner appearing on Google were identical to what they made available on their site; which, however, had obtained it exclusively from Desiigner himself, while all the other sites that host musical texts published versions full of errors. In those months, Genius modified the apostrophes of some texts in his archive to understand if that of “Panda” was a coincidence: the same changes then appeared in the Google box that shows the lyrics of the songs. In all, Genius claims to have identified a hundred such cases.
It is not clear how Genius intends to bring forward a possible lawsuit against Google, given that it does not own the copyright on the texts it publishes, but only on the notes it attaches: in any case, after the publication of the Wall article Street Journal Google said it will launch an internal investigation into the company that collects song lyrics for its search engine. The company is called LyricFind and for the moment has denied copying the texts it curates for Google from Genius.
