Google again got into a legal battle with Genius, A company that was claiming that Google was using their transcribed lyrics without permission in their search results. The company sued Google in 2019, saying that Google was scraping lyrics from the website in violation of the Genius Copyright, Genius has a very large database of a lot of song lyrics, and they claim themselves to be the world’s biggest music encyclopedia.

They said and demonstrated that Google was scraping information from their website by putting watermarks in their lyrics, which they said then appeared in Google search results but without any link or any kind of attribution back to Genius. Google said on a blog post at the time they did not really clear all or scrape websites to source song lyrics. LyricFind (Canadian lyrics licensing site) that was also a defendant in the lawsuit, licenses its lyric transcriptions to Google.

Judge Margo Brodie ruled in August 2020 that although Genius’ claims of scraping appeared credible, they didn’t constitute a copyright violation as Genius isn’t the actual copyright holder of the lyrics, which they said belonged to the musicians who wrote them. Genius licenses these lyrics, adding them through derivative works like annotations, but the Judge said that making these derivative works didn’t give the company any ownership over the actual lyrics. On Thursday, a 3 judge panel in the Second Circuit affirmed the earlier decision, saying that the lyrics are protected by copyrights that the company (Genius) does not own.