SCOTUS refuses to revive Genius' 2019 lawsuit accusing Google of scraping millions of song lyrics for search, leaving in place a ruling tossing out the lawsuit
The US Supreme Court refused to revive a lawsuit by music website Genius Media Group Inc. accusing Alphabet Inc.'s Google of stealing millions of song lyrics.
Context & Ripple Effects
This closes a four-year arc that began when Genius published what it called irrefutable watermark-based proof that Google was lifting its lyric transcriptions into search results, followed by a $400M anticompetitive lawsuit against Google and LyricFind. A federal judge rejected the copyright theory in 2020, and the case has been stuck at the revival stage since.
The endgame was telegraphed: after the Supreme Court asked the Biden administration to weigh in last December, the Justice Department urged the court to leave the dismissal alone — advice SCOTUS has now effectively followed by refusing to hear the case.
First-order effects
- Genius Media Group's legal campaign is over: the 2020 dismissal stands, and its claimed $400M damages route against Google and LyricFind is closed.
- Google's practice of displaying song lyrics in search results now faces no pending court challenge from Genius.
Second-order effects
- Other sites contemplating lawsuits over search engines reproducing their content lose this case as a template — the appellate ruling that sank Genius' copyright theory goes unreviewed at the highest level, raising the cost of filing similar suits.
- Licensed lyrics suppliers like LyricFind exit with their distribution model intact, reinforcing licensing intermediaries as the sanctioned channel between rights holders and search.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, disputes over platforms reproducing web-published text get settled through licensing arrangements and technical measures rather than copyright litigation — a structure whose stakes grow as AI training raises the same copying question at far larger scale.
The trend: Courts are declining to treat scraped web content as copyright infringement, pushing publishers toward licensing deals and technical defenses instead of lawsuits.