The U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by music website Genius Media Group after a lower court threw out its lawsuit against Alphabet, the parent company of Google, for stealing millions of song transcripts.
On June 26, Supreme Court left in place a ruling that dismissed the suit by Genius, which accused Google of a breach of contract by posting song lyrics in its search engine results without a license.
Google scored a victory earlier this year after justices ruled that its video-streaming platform YouTube couldn’t be held liable for hosting terrorist videos.
However, there’s still no clear decision on how copyright laws apply to online speech and aggregation.
Google spokesperson Jose Castaneda said the company is satisfied by the Supreme Court’s decision.
Vast Database of User Song Lyrics
Genius, formerly known as Rap Genius, maintains a vast database of user song lyrics.The music firm had argued that a high court ruling in favor of Google would allow big tech to steal content without consequences from websites such as Reddit, eBay, and Wikipedia, which aggregate user-created information.
They claimed that Google violated its contract by posting lyrics and boosting them in its search engine results without attribution, as stated in its terms of service, which are typically backed by state laws.
The company filed a claim against Google in a New York state court in 2019, accusing it of posting the transcripts to the top of its search results and diverting web traffic that should have gone to Genius’s website.
Genius claimed that the tech giant cost them millions of dollars in losses.
Google responded that the music database was attempting to bring a “quasi-copyright” claim under the cover of contract law and that it didn’t “crawl or scrape websites to source” the song lyrics.
A lower New York state court ruled in 2020 that Genius didn’t own any of the copyrights to its lyrics, but they belonged to the songwriters and publishers.
Genius conceded that it didn’t hold copyrights to the lyrics, but it still accused Google of violating its terms of service by stealing and reposting its work.
Genius said the lower court’s decision “threatens to hobble any of thousands of companies that offer value by aggregating user-generated information or other content.”
Federal law preempts lawsuits over issues that are similar to copyright law, even if they don’t explicitly focus on copyright infringement claims.
The lower court dismissed the breach of contract claims based on that distinction and that the concerns could only be pursued in a copyright lawsuit.
Last year, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit affirmed the New York state court’s ruling.
Watermarks Secretly Included
The music website also posted lyrics that secretly included watermarks with the words “RED HANDED” in Morse code to prove that Google was stealing music in an attempt to drum up public attention for its lawsuit.In its Supreme Court petition, Genius stated that it caught Google posting transcripts for some new songs that included the “RED HANDED” watermarks in its search results.
“Sure enough, Genius caught Google with its hand in the cookie jar: The ‘RED HANDED’ message soon began to appear in the lyrics in Google’s information boxes,” Genius informed the justices.
Google told the justices that it already held the licenses to the lyrics and that Genius wanted to “ignore the true copyright owners and invent new rights through a purported contract.”
Josh Rosenkranz, a lawyer for Genius, said the company was disappointed that SCOTUS let the circuit court’s ruling stand.
He noted that the lower court’s decision “allows companies like Google to swallow up their competitors by misappropriating their content without any repercussions.”
The Biden administration in May urged the Supreme Court, through U.S. solicitor general Elizabeth Prelogar, to turn down the appeal, arguing that it was a “poor vehicle” to resolve copyright law and contractual rights disputes.
