The US Supreme Court docket refused to revive a lawsuit by music web site Genius Media Group Inc. accusing Alphabet Inc.’s Google of stealing hundreds of thousands of tune lyrics.
The justices left in place a ruling that tossed out the go well with, which accused Google of violating a contract with Genius by utilizing its tune lyrics in search outcomes with out attribution.
It is the newest victory on the Supreme Court docket for Google, which earlier this 12 months gained a battle over whether or not its video-streaming platform YouTube may be held accountable for internet hosting terrorist movies.
There are deep disagreements over how copyright legal guidelines apply to on-line speech and aggregation. The decrease court docket mentioned Genius doesn’t personal any of the copyrights to its lyrics – as an alternative, these are held by the songwriters and publishers.
Genius claimed that Google violated its contract by scraping lyrics and boosting them in Google Search outcomes with none attribution. Genius, which claimed the saga brought about hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in losses for the web site, initially sued Google in 2019. With the intention to drum up consideration and show its case, Genius mentioned it used a secret code spelling out the phrase “red-handed” to show Google was stealing its lyrics.
“We admire the court docket’s resolution, agreeing with the Solicitor Normal and a number of decrease courts that Genius’ claims haven’t any benefit,” Google spokesman José Castañeda mentioned Monday. “We license lyrics on Google Search from third events, and we don’t crawl or scrape web sites to supply lyrics.”
Phrases of service, that are used on most web sites, are sometimes backed by state regulation. Genius and its supporters argued the choice may successfully water down the contractual protections web sites take pleasure in when customers comply with their phrases.
Learn Extra: Google Lyric-Scraping Combat With Genius Primed for Supreme Court docket
Google argued Genius was making an attempt to deliver a “quasi-copyright” declare underneath the guise of contracts regulation. Federal regulation preempts lawsuits over points which can be much like copyright, even when they do not explicitly heart on copyright infringement claims. That distinction proved deadly to Genius’s case.
Genius mentioned the decrease court docket’s resolution “threatens to hobble any of hundreds of firms that supply worth by aggregating user-generated data or different content material.”
US Solicitor Normal Elizabeth Prelogar, the Biden administration’s prime Supreme Court docket lawyer, urged the justices to skip the case, arguing it’s a “poor automobile” to resolve the stress between copyright regulation and contractual rights.
The case is ML Genius Holdings v. Google, 22-121.
