Genius Hid A Morse Code Message To Prove Google Was Copying Them

From the headline, you'd think the people at Genius are geniuses (details below). After all, they hid some Morse code in other people's copyrighted lyrics they make publicly available online (which they published without copyright approval from the original owners of the lyrics) and ... wait for it ... proved that Google (GOOG, GOOGL) (which crawls the web for a living) used the publicly available information to create a better Google search experience.

I am a big fan of copyrights, copyright law, and intellectual property rights of all kinds. But unless there is a statutory royalty scheme, explicit copyright notification from the actual copyright owner (Ⓒ 2019 XYZ Productions, Inc. All rights reserved.), or the work is not previously published, it's fair game (for non-commercial use). We can argue all day about lyric publishing sites and fair use, etc., but how does a site that displays lyrics from published works -- without paying royalties -- complain that another organization is at fault for scraping their site?

There are nuances in intellectual property law that we don't have time to get into here. But, on the whole, this is like scraping news stories, prices, or item descriptions; if you don't want stuff copied, don't put it online. If your work is derivative to begin with, you probably don't have standing to complain.

As always, your thoughts and comments are both welcome and strongly encouraged.

Did you ever notice how you tend to Google the lyrics of a song and then you don’t bother clicking through to Genius’s website because Google displays them right on the search results page? Well, Genius alleges that Google has been copying its lyrics for years and posting them directly on Google Search, thus preventing visitors from going to its own site. And here’s the best part: Genius says it hid a Morse code message within some lyrics on its site to prove Google has been stealing them and reposting them word for word.

Genius hid a Morse code message in song lyrics to prove Google was copying them
By Chris Smith,
June 17th, 2019 at 6:50 AM

Genius first suspected Google of wrong-doing in 2016 when a software engineer discovered that Desiigner’s Panda song lyrics on Google matched the ones on Genius. The song has lyrics that are very difficult to understand, The Wall Street Journal reports, but Genius had the error-free version of the lyrics straight from the artist.

“We noticed that Google’s lyrics matched our lyrics down to the character,” Genius’s chief strategy officer Ben Gross told The Journal. Genius notified Google in 2017, and then again in April of this year that copied transcriptions appeared on Google Search.

“Over the last two years, we’ve shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius,” Gross said.

To catch Google, Genius watermarked lyrics with the help of apostrophes, alternating between straight and curly single-quote marks in exactly the same sequence for every song. When turned into dots and dashes, the apostrophes spell the words Red Handed, which is a smart trick.

Continue reading at BGR.