Supreme Court Rejects Genius’ Preposterously Stupid Lawsuit Against Google
from the not-genius dept
Look, we were not kind when Genius first accused Google of copying lyrics from its site. The only interesting bit was the cleverness with which Genius figured out Google had copied the lyrics from its site, by sneakily adding in curved or non-curved apostrophes to see if the same ones showed up in Google’s version of the lyrics.
But, as we noted at the time, even if Google copied the lyrics from Genius, that was not a legal matter. After all, Genius did not hold any rights in the lyrics, and its method of “getting” the lyrics was basically having people copy down what they heard (one of the stupid things about copyright and lyrics is that there are no official lyrics most of the time, and every lyric site, even those that “license” lyrics, still have to figure out what those lyrics are, which is just kinda crazy when you think about it). And, more importantly, we had a lawsuit almost exactly on this point years ago, where a phone book company inserted fake entries to capture those who “copied” their phone book, and the court said that you can’t copyright facts, and allowed it to stand.
We were even less kind when Genius stupidly sued Google anyway. And we were not at all surprised when a judge rejected the many, many, many ways in which the company tried to turn this into a legal claim. And so, it’s no surprise that this case ends with a complete whimper as the Supreme Court rejected Genius’ cert petition with no comment.
There’s really not much more to say about this other than whoever decided to bring this case in the first place was no genius, and just wasted a bunch of money on high priced lawyers to bring an exceptionally silly case.
Next time, the company should just put a copy of its planned complaint on Genius for copyright experts to annotate before they bring such a silly lawsuit.
Filed Under: contract, facts, fair use, lyrics, supreme court
Companies: genius, google
Comments on “Supreme Court Rejects Genius’ Preposterously Stupid Lawsuit Against Google”
not just about copyright
I think its important to note that Genius tried to claim that google broke the TOS agreement, even though google never agreed to the TOS. Genius claimed that just by using the site it was an implied agreement. The court rejected that logic.
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Reminds me of the ‘by reading this message you are legally bound from discussing it with or showing it to anyone else’ letters that have come up a few times on TD in articles about terrible lawyers.
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It’s good that this was rejected. Out of curiosity, did Genius explain how people might have learned of these terms without first using their site? Usually, the terms are on the very site they refer to.
Re: Where did the court mention that argument in its ruling?
It would be interesting to see a rejection of “website terms of service”, but I think what happened here was that the court more simply said “all your complaints are superseded by the Copyright Act, and you are not a copyright owner, nor do you have an assigned rights from a copyright owner.”
But if the court overtly “rejected that logic”, please point me to the correct paragraph, as I read the opinion twice.
I suspect Netflix is doing something similar, and maybe exactly this in certain cases. A lot of Netflix rips have non-breaking spaces in the subtitles with no obvious logic to their placement. And, sometimes, there are a handful of non-ASCII apostrophes, inconsistently placed. I’ve also seen subtitles with unexpected Cyrillic letters, such as В standing in for B, but can’t remember whether that was from Netflix.
These are often the only non-ASCII characters in the subtitles, so they kind of stand out. And I’m sure I read about such ideas decades ago.
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Map makers love to do things like this.
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Yeah, and it can be really annoying. I tried to access a “street” near my workplace, which looked like it might connect to a nearby bike path. But the supposed intersection was a dead end, with an old-looking fence, a “private property” sign, and some cows grazing beyond.
Are misheard lyrics copyrightable?
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I don’t think so. But I’ll have to check on that later. Now, excuse me while I kiss this guy…
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You’re kissing that guy? I thought it was Lady Mondegreen…
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It’s an understandable mistake, after all, dude looks like lady!
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Probably not by the original artist
Venue Matters
Had the case been brought here in Agloe, NY I can guarantee the results would be different.
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Lying corporate shill and unethical human being, putting corporate profits above public safety.
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We know it’s you, Jhon.
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Hey Jhon you still running that email scam list?
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Damn, John, did you forget your login credentials to your latest spam account already?
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Seriously! Because some third party fed copied lyrics to Google’s search results, I got hit by a car!
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Jhon pls
did your crypto scam fail again
get the fuck out
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Paid by industry to protect tech profits over human lives, morality, and public welfare. Scumbag and lying corporate shill. Liar liar liar.
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Poor impotent old Jhon can’t even get up the “will” to pretend to sue anymore.
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jhon pls
did the etherum community catch on to ypur latest scam
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He is a likely a paid corporate shill taking money from Big Tech to screw victims of online crimes and abuse.
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Quit spamming, Jhon.
We’d have flying cars if people put half as much effort into doing good for the world as they have put into finding a way to sue Google for something to get a payday.
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We should sue Google for not bringing us flying cars.
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As time has gone on, I’ve realized I don’t want flying cars:
A) Given how many automotive accidents occur on a daily basis, if there was not an extremely strict and rigorous training regime with frequent recertification to be allowed to operate a flying car, we’d just have a significant portion of the population as unintentional kamikaze bombers.
B) Said rigorous certification program would likely lead to it being something for the rich only – huzzah for more stratification? The other way to do it and get around it would be to enforce human control as largely secondary, with flying cars following preplanned routes under automatic control. This removes a lot of the one advantage that a car has, which is independent travel…
C) Cars are not particularly good for society in the first place. Massively inefficient space-to-passenger ratio, major source of pollution, enormous safety hazard, etc. etc. Plenty of reasons to dislike them. Much better to make flying public transportation. Like an airbus.
Wait…
Dammit, we’ve reinvented passenger plane travel.
Less jokingly, something like a city bus with the ability to fly would be neat, but ultimately I don’t see that happening without someone discovering actual Star Wars style anti-gravity hovering stuff…
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There IS a flying car that’s certified for both road and air.
https://electrek.co/2023/06/27/worlds-first-flying-car-gets-flight-certified-electric/
Don’t mind the clickbait title, everyone does it nowadays…
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Of all the things, I’ve realised I don’t want flying cars, at least not before we have full self driving. Think about the average driver, then imagine they can drop on to your roof if they make a mistake….
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Masnick is paid by industry to spew lies and misinformation
Section 230 needs to be repealed. Courts are corrupt, Big Tech bribes SCOTUS, Congress needs to act or America is fucked.
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Of all the things that are never going to happen. This is never going to happen the most.
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“Section 230 needs to be repealed. Courts are corrupt, Big Tech bribes SCOTUS, Congress needs to act or America is fucked.”
230 is fine, you’re ignorant
Yes, some members of the court are corrupt
Yes, big biz is corrupt
Many in congress are corrupt
Stating the obvious is fun is it not?
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Guy, Section 230 had nothing to do with this case. A lack of Section 230 would not have magically altered copyright or contract law to make Google liable for the claims Genius threw against them.
The only lesson to be had here is: play stupid games, win stupid prizes. But I suppose you can speak from a wealth of experience.
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Section 230 protects everyone, including small businesses with websites and federated indie platforms. If 230 gets repealed, only the corporations will be able to afford the threat of litigation and all the little guys would pack it up rather than risk it and platforms for poor people would shutter in the face of risk.
You’re the corporate shill if you want to repeal 230.
How does Genius differ from the eBay case?
There have been cases were the ToS argument worked. In a case from eBay, a robot.txt file was used to successfully argue the spidering the site was electronic trespassing. There are more cases like that. Why is this case different?
If you want more privacy when kissing the guy, there’s a bathroom on the right.
Ah. If I remember that case correctly: robots.txt specifically denied the scraper. The scraper specifically didn’t check robots.txt (like anybody does, especially North Korea, China and Russia … I have logs if you’d like to see).
My opinion on the matter is the judge made a bad call. robots.txt sure as hell isn’t a legally binding document (and any web admin knows it’s actually pointless).
Firewall rules however, do work, And Are legally binding.
Stealing labor from smaller company
So let me get this straight you think it’s perfectly ok for a multibillion dollar company to steal the product that a much smaller company paid people to create.
Re: That's not how any of that works
Please show consideration for your fellow commentors and clean up any loose straw after beating the stuffing out of the strawman you just created.
After that you might want to click on the very first link in this article which goes through the whole debacle and makes clear that this isn’t even remotely a case of ‘big company steals from small one’.
Appellate decision
I was surprised that the SC’s denial of certiorari was covered here (as was the District Court’s decision), but the Court of Appeals wasn’t even mentioned in connection with this suit. This is odd because, in order to even apply for cert in the Supreme Court where the SC doesn’t have original jurisdiction, you must first have a decision (or refusal to hear the case) from either the Court of Appeals for that district (in federal cases) or the highest state court within that particular state (in state or lower cases); you can’t simply skip straight from the District Court to the Supreme Court.
So, here is the decision from the 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals, for those who are interested.
Obviously, it affirms the lower court’s decision, but there are two things I thought were interesting: