Google statement] Google allegedly used stolen Genius lyrics, caught through Morse code trick

Google’s knowledge graph is a two-edged sword. On the one hand, it’s great for us users and offers us information at a glance before we ever need to enter a website. On the other hand, publishers are losing a lot of impressions because people don’t click through to them anymore. This is particularly evident for lyrics providers; ever since Google started to offer song texts in search, traffic has naturally dropped for them. Now, one of the biggest players, Genius, has accused the search engine of illegally lifting lyrics from their platform and has provided evidence in the form of clever apostrophe use.

You read that right. According to The Wall Street Journal, Genius has long suspected Google’s search cards of copying its lyrics, starting with rapper Desiigner’s song “Panda” in 2016 — whose hard-to-understand text matched Genius’ character-by-character. Thus, the company had the (pardon me) genius idea to introduce a watermarking system that consists of alternating…