Genius: We Caught Google Red Handed Stealing Our Lyrics

Jun 17, 2019 - 7:50 am 7 by
Filed Under Google News

Genius

The Wall Street Journal reported that Genius, the lyrics web site, has said they caught Google literally red handed stealing lyrics from their web site without any attribution or payment. Google denies it and says they license the lyrics from a third-party but will be investigating the situation.

How Genius caught Google "red handed" was pretty smart. They used straight and curly single-quote marks within the lyrics to form a unique morse code string that outputted "red handed" when decoded. They were the only ones to use this method and they knew when Google showed the quotes in this fashion that Google was indeed picking up the lyrics from their web site.

Here is a screen shot from the WSJ:

Genius Evidence Of Stolen Lyrics

Google replied on Twitter saying they are going to investigate:

What likely happened, I would guess, is that the site Google was licensing the lyrics from was actually stealing the content from Genius. Of course, this is just a guess and maybe Google was stealing from Genius directly or maybe something else is going on?

Google was informed about this from Genius years ago but didn't take the claims seriously until now, when the WSJ published its article.

Rand summed it up:

Kevin Marks, a well respected open source guy and someone who has years and years of working at Google and other companies like it said:

Here is a screen shot of Google's lyrics for this song right now:

click for full size

Good going Google!

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.

 

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