Genius/Google Dispute Gets Even Dumber: Microsoft And Amazon Show Same 'Coded' Lyrics, But Genius Doesn't Care

On Tuesday we did a deep dive into the whole kerfuffle over Genius claiming that Google was "scraping" its lyrics and explained why the whole story was a huge nothingburger. There are lots of reasons to be worried about Google, but this was not one of them. Among the many, many points in the article, we noted that Google had properly licensed the lyrics, that LyricFind admitted that it was the one responsible, that most publishers don't even know the lyrics they're licensing in the first place, and that basically everyone just copies them from everyone else. And, now, just to put a fine point on how this entire story in the Wall Street Journal (which has published multiple anti-Google editorials over the past few years) was concocted just to attack Google over something it hadn't done, a Wired article analyzing the situation notes that Microsoft's Bing and Amazon Music also display the identical lyrics that appear to have the "coded" or "watermarked" apostrophes that Genius put in place:

One thing that some news stories have missed about Genius' allegations is that Google is far from alone in surfacing lyrics that may have originated from Genius. Microsoft Bing and Amazon Music also appear to have Genius-watermarked lyrics.

And Genius' response to this further evidence that it's not Google doing anything particularly nefarious?

Genius would not comment on other sites' apparent use of its transcripts.

In other words "hey, don't mess with our narrative that big bad Google is the problem..."

Again, there are plenty of reasons to be concerned about Google -- and we've covered many of them over the years. But a totally misleading and ginned up story that does not accurately portray the situation or the law is not helping anything but the outrage machine.