Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge
On Tuesday, Google beat back a lawsuit over alleged scraping of song lyrics from Genius, a lyrics and commentary site. A federal judge in the Eastern District of New York found that while the claims of scraping were credible, the scraping did not constitute a copyright violation, and the lawsuit was dismissed as a result.
Genius alleged in December 2019 that Google was lifting its lyrics. The scraping was demonstrated by sneaking a clever text watermark into Genius’ lyrics entries, in one case using a series of apostrophes to spell out “red handed” in Morse code. The watermark subsequently appeared in related Google searches, without a link or attribution to Genius.
Earlier that year, Google published a blog post proclaiming the company…