(Hypebot) Lyrics annotation site Genius.com says that it has caught Google stealing and using its song lyrics to power some of the tech giant’s search results, Genius says it caught Google by cleverly inserting a series of alternating straight and curved apostrophes in the lyrics that it hosts and then finding them verbatim in more than 100 Google search results.
In a statement to The Verge, Genius Chief Strategy Officer Ben Gross said that the company has “shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius in their Lyrics OneBox. This is a serious issue, and Google needs to address it.”
Google and one of its primary licensed lyric providers, LyricFind have denied using lyrics from Genius. Here is Google’s full response via Engadget:
“The lyrics displayed in the information boxes and in Knowledge Panels on Google Search are licensed from a variety of sources and are not scraped from sites on the web. We take data quality and creator rights very seriously, and hold our licensing partners accountable to the terms of our agreement. We’re investigating this issue with our data partners and if we find that partners are not upholding good practices we will end our agreements.”
According to Genius, they detected the hidden morse code, which spells ‘red handed’ in at least 100 sets of lyrics delivered via Google.
