Google has won another victory in its ongoing legal battle with lyrics site Genius. The entanglement between the two parties dates back to 2019, with the site claiming that Google violated Genius’ copyright by using its transcribed lyrics in search results without permission.
Genius has a huge database of lyrics and describes itself as “the world’s largest music encyclopedia.” It tried to prove that Google scraped information from its website to watermark its lyrics, which it said subsequently appeared in Google Search without any link or attribution to Genius.
Google said in a blog post at the time that it did not “crawl or scrape websites for” lyrics. LyricFind, a Canadian lyrics-licensing site also a defendant in the Genius lawsuit, licensed its lyrics transcriptions to Google.
Judge Margo Brodie ruled in August 2020 that while Genius’ claims of crawling appeared to be plausible, it did not constitute copyright infringement because Genius was not the actual copyright owner of the lyrics, she said These lyrics belong to the musician who wrote the lyrics. Genius licenses the lyrics, supplementing them with derivative works such as annotations, but Brody said that doesn’t mean Genius owns the actual lyrics themselves.
On Thursday, a three-judge panel of the Second Circuit affirmed the previous ruling, writing that the lyrics are protected by copyrights that Genius does not own.