Genius accuses Google of stealing content

Genius has accused Google of stealing content to put on its platform. Genius is a site that publishes and analyzes hip-hop lyrics.

Genius claims that Google has been damaging its traffic by stealing content. This content is then placed into Google Play Music, which also features lyrics in search results.

However, as might be expected, Google has denied any charge. This is a problem that small businesses sometimes face when Google starts to make them competition.

Genius caught Google in a ‘cool’ way

In order to avoid any doubts about the charges, Genius made very subtle changes in some of its lyrics. In the following image we can see how the position of the apostrophes was copied. The first example is Genius, the second is from Google searches.

Ben Gross, CFO of Genius, said they have found more than 100 examples of letters copied by Google over the past two years. Gross added that the examples were detected through a system of watermarks embedded in the formatting of the apostrophes. 

From the moment Genius deliberately changes punctuation and Google copies, something is wrong. What is happening is that when you do a search, Google wants you to have as much information on the dashboard without entering websites. This is good for anyone planning to do a quick but lousy search for sites that need traffic to survive.

Shivam Singh

Founder of the TechGrits, has always looked at technology as a piece of knots. From an early age connected to the technological world, this is literally your dream job.

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