Google accused of stealing lyrics embedded with morse code

Used Morse Code to catch the company stealing lyrics

 

Digital media company, Genius, has accused Google of stealing its lyrics that are crowd-sourced on its website.

According to a report published in theWall Street Journal, Genius used Morse Code to catch Google stealing lyrics, which the company has spent years gathering from rappers, pop stars, and other musicians.

Genius said that they had proof Google has taken content from their website as it uses a watermarking system. This system alters between straight and curly single-quote marks in its apostrophes.  Genius used this system to encrypt the words ‘Red Handed’ into various lyrics.



An excerpt of “Not Today” by Alessia Cara. PHOTO: GENIUS

“Over the last two years, we’ve shown Google irrefutable evidence again and again that they are displaying lyrics copied from Genius,” said Ben Gross, Genius’s chief strategy officer in an email to The Wall Street Journal.

These words came up in Google’s Knowledge and Information Graph search results, however, Google has denied the accusations saying they did not steal any lyrics and the ones coming up on the information panel are from the licensed partners.

“We take data quality and creator rights very seriously and hold our licensing partners accountable to the terms of our agreement,” a Google representative stated while talking to The Wall Street Journal



Google is trying to provide as much information as possible for the users at the search page so they do not have to navigate somewhere else. This is a huge convenience for the users, but not so much for the websites that depend on the users to click on them.

The Department of Justice and Federal Trade Commission is probing the big tech companies like Google, Facebook and Amazon to break them up. Such law-suits can only prove to be a catalyst to the process.

This article originally appeared on The Wall Street Journal.