YELP Yelp Inc

By Robert McMillan 

Five months after it accused Google of publishing lifted song lyrics, music website Genius Media Group Inc. is suing the search giant over what it alleges amounts to anticompetitive behavior that has harmed its business.

The lawsuit, filed in state court in Brooklyn, N.Y., on Tuesday, seeks $50 million in combined minimum damages from Google and LyricFind, a Canadian company that provides the music lyrics.

The case puts the spotlight on growing concerns that big tech companies like Google, a unit of Alphabet Inc., can stifle smaller competitors through some of their business practices. The Justice Department and Federal Trade Commission have started investigating some of the actions of tech companies. Companies such as Yelp Inc. and TripAdvisor Inc. are among others that have accused Google of unfairly preferencing its own content in search results.

Genius, based in Brooklyn, says traffic to its site, where it posts hard-to-decipher lyrics to hip-hop songs and other pop hits, began dropping because Google has been publishing lyrics on its own platform, and alleges some of them were lifted directly from the music site.

Genius holds no copyright claims on the lyrics, but says that lifting lyrics from its website is a violation of its terms of service.

Google has said it doesn't scrape websites, but rather secures its licenses and lyrics transcriptions from business partners such as LyricFind, which licenses the lyrics from music publishers, giving companies such as Google, Amazon.com Inc., and Microsoft Corp. a way to publish lyrics online.

LyricFind and Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. LyricFind said on its website in June that while it doesn't copy lyrics from Genius.com, it is possible that it had "unknowingly sourced Genius lyrics from another location." LyricFind also said the scale of the alleged copying was "minuscule and clearly not systemic."

Genius in June disclosed that it had used a clever system to watermark 301 of its song transcriptions between October and December 2018 with a morse-code message. It claims that 116 of them -- or about 39% of the total that were watermarked -- appeared in lyric boxes that were published on Google.com.

Genius says that after it went public with its allegations, the watermarks were removed from Google's website but that the reuse of its transcriptions persists.

In August, it created a new watermark. This one, the company said, is embedded in the obscure characters used to create the blank spaces between words of song lyrics. Genius said that it has found about 1,000 examples of lyrics containing the new watermark on Google's website, although some of those examples were subsequently replaced with non-watermarked versions.

As of this week, 828 of those lyrics contained watermarks, Genius said. These came from LyricFind and another lyrics site used by Google, called Musixmatch SpA, according to Genius.

In an email before the lawsuit was filed, Musixmatch chief executive Max Ciociola called Genius's complaints "ridiculous," since the company doesn't hold copyright to the lyrics in question. Mr. Ciociola said Musixmatch transcriptions have shown up on Genius.com. "This is how [the] internet works when it's about text," he said.

Genius says that it has seen its traffic from Google decline since the search company started posting lyrics directly to its site in boxes, which it calls "information panels," rather than refer users to Genius's website.

The impact on Genius's web traffic can be stark, the music site said. In October, Genius posted to its website a watermarked transcription of Selena Gomez's new single, "Lose You to Love Me." Within a day, the page was the most-viewed on Genius.com, with more than 600,000 page views. According to Genius, 75% of people searching for the song were clicking through to its site.

On November 4, Google posted a version of the lyrics credited to LyricFind to the Google search page, and click-throughs to Genius plummeted to 5%, Genius alleges. The lyrics Google showed contained the Genius watermark as of Tuesday.

Without a copyright claim, Genius faces an uphill battle in the courts, said John Bergmayer, legal director with the consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge. But Google has to take the growing number of complaints seriously given the antitrust probes, he said. The cases could be used to establish a pattern of behavior that would be actionable in an antitrust case, Mr. Bergmayer said.

Write to Robert McMillan at Robert.Mcmillan@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 03, 2019 11:55 ET (16:55 GMT)

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