23 June 2019

WHAT THE GOOGLE-GENIUS COPYRIGHT DISPUTE IS REALLY ABOUT


THE ANTITRUST PITCHFORKS are out for big tech. First came the European Union, then Washington, DC. Not to be left out, now comes hip hop lyrics.

Over the weekend, the music annotation site Genius publicly accused search juggernaut Google of stealing its crowdsourced song transcripts and natively publishing them on its search pages in knowledge panels Google calls its “One Box.” Doing so, Genius alleges, hurts Genius’ bottom line by diverting traffic away from Genius in favor of keeping people on Google’s monetized search page instead. As Genius sees it, this is an example not just of lyric lifting but of Google using its scale to unfairly home in on a smaller competitor’s territory, which experts say could constitute a potential antitrust matter. Google strongly denies all of it, blaming a contractor for any similarity between its lyrics and Genius’.

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