Genius Says It Caught Google, LyricFind "Redhanded" Stealing Lyrics in $50M Suit

The music lyrics site used a digital watermark to see if other sites were copying its product — and it spelled "redhanded" in Morse code.

Lyrics site Genius on Tuesday sued Google and LyricFind for $50 million, alleging they have been misappropriating its transcriptions for years.

The site became suspicious after noticing lyrics to Desiigner's 2016 hit "Panda" that appeared in a Google search results box matched its transcription character-for-character. After the discovery, Genius implemented a watermark using variations of apostrophes in its lyrics.

"Genius set the 2nd, 5th, 13th, 14th, 16th and 20th apostrophes of each watermarked song as curly apostrophes, and all the other apostrophes straight," states the complaint. "If the straight apostrophes are interpreted as dots and the curly apostrophes are interpreted as dashes, the pattern spells out 'REDHANDED' in Morse code."

For months, Genius monitored Google results looking for the watermark. In May 2017, it contacted the tech giant explaining the watermark and using Kendrick Lamar's "PRIDE" as an example. The company asserts multiple Google execs claimed they were looking into the issue but never offered an explanation. -- excerpt, rest at link above --

I am posting this mostly because I love seeing Google slapped around.