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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 a 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 actions of tech companies. Companies including Yelp Inc. and TripAdvisor Inc. have accused Google of unfairly preferring 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 and other hit songs, began falling because Google began publishing lyrics on its own platform. Genius alleges some of the lyrics were lifted directly from its music website.

Genius holds no copyright claims on the lyrics but says lifting lyrics from its site violates its terms of service.

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

Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit. A LyricFind spokesman said the company hasn't had contact with Genius since June, hasn't been served with the complaint and believes the case to be "frivolous and without merit."

LyricFind on its website said 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 from October to December 2018 it used a clever system to watermark 301 of its song transcriptions, with a Morse-code message. It claims that 116 of them -- or about 39% of the total that were watermarked -- appeared in lyric boxes published on Google.com.

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

In August, Genius created a new watermark, this one embedded in the obscure characters used to create blank spaces between words of song lyrics. Genius said it has found more than 1,000 examples of lyrics with the new watermark on Google's website, although some were subsequently replaced with nonwatermarked 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, Genius says.

In an email before the suit was filed, Musixmatch Chief Executive Max Ciociola called Genius's complaints "ridiculous," since it 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 Nov. 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 says. 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 20:40 ET (01:40 GMT)

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