According to the website Genius.com, Google allegedly copied the song lyrics shown on the search engine directly from its own site. Here’s why
How many times have you searched Google for “song title+text” or “title+lyrics” and the search engine showed you a text box where the lyrics of the song you searched for appeared? Surely more than once, because it is a feature of Google for quite a while, but now it could cost dearly to the Mountain View company that has been denounced in the U.S. by Genius Media Inc.
Genius Media is the company behind the site Genius.com that, in addition to publishing news about music, also publishes the lyrics of many songs. Through a very trivial stratagem Genius Media has been able to demonstrate that some lyrics shown by Google in its boxes inside the search results pages come directly (and without any modification) from Genius.com pages and that Big G, in fact, has copied them. Google has not yet responded to the accusations, but it is not the first time that Big G has faced complaints from sites from which it draws information.
Where do the lyrics of the songs shown by Google come from
That box that shows you the lyrics of the song usually looks like this: at the top there is the title, just below the artist, then the first part of the lyrics of the song. Then there is an arrow pointing downwards: if you click on it, the rest of the lyrics, the composers and the Copyright appear. This box is part of the so-called “rich snippets” of Google and other examples of these snippets are recipes, information about a place or a famous person (often extracted from Wikipedia). The problem with rich snippets is that the user, if he has the information he is looking for directly from Google, will never click on the site from which that information is taken. For this reason, there are many sites that complain about this behaviour of Google, accusing the company of copying its own contents.
Google pinched for apostrophes
Genius managed to demonstrate that “Google copies” with a very simple stratagem: it inserted in the lyrics of the songs a series of apostrophes, some in italics and others without formatting. The distribution of these apostrophes was actually nothing more than a message in Morse code: “Red Handed”. Which in Italian means “Caught in the act”. Google, therefore, according to Genius has been caught with its hands in the cookie jar and, now, will have to answer for its behavior in court because in the rich snippets taken from the site Genius.com the apostrophes were all still there.