Feds Urge Supreme Court To Skip Lawsuit Pitting Genius Against Google Over Song Lyrics

But in a brief filed Tuesday , the U.S. Solicitor General told the Supreme Court to steer clear. It said the case was a “poor vehicle” for reviewing the issues in the case, and that the lower court did not appear to have done anything particularly novel when it dismissed the case against Google.

Genius sued the tech giant in 2019, claiming Google had stolen the site’s carefully-transcribed content for its own “information boxes” in search results, essentially free-riding on the “time, labor, systems and resources” that go into creating such a service. In a splashy twist, Genius said it had used a secret code buried within lyrics that spelled out REDHANDED to prove Google’s wrongdoing.

But in March, that distinction proved fatal for Genius. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit dismissed the case, ruling that only the actual copyright owners — songwriters or publishers — could have filed such a case, not a site that merely transcribed the lyrics. In technical terms, the court said the case was “preempted” by federal copyright law, meaning that the accusations from Genius were so similar to a copyright claim that they could only have been filed that way.

Such petitions are always a long shot since the Supreme Court takes less than 2% of the 7,000 cases it receives each year. But in December, the justicesIn Tuesday’s filing, the DOJ said firmly that it should not — arguing, among other things, that the lower court’s ruling for Google had been largely correct.

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