Genius.com Nerds Catch Google Stealing Their Content By Secretly Using Different Apostrophes That Spell Out "RED HANDED" In Morse Code

NY POST — The song lyrics platform Genius is suing Google after catching the search giant “red-handed” publishing text cribbed from its website.

The Brooklyn-based firm is seeking at least $50 million in combined damages from Google and LyricFind, the Canadian company that allegedly provided the stolen lyrics placed in information boxes at the top of Google searches.

Google and LyricFind “have been caught red-handed misappropriating content from Genius’s website, which they have exploited — and continue to exploit — for their own financial benefit and to Genius’s financial detriment,” says the Brooklyn Supreme Court complaint filed Tuesday, which also calls the companies’ practices “anticompetitive.”

I don't think it's very often that the tech guys and web engineers get called total badasses, but Genius.com is currently buying rounds of beers and shots for their nerds and geeks after they bent big bad Google over their knee and spanked them until they called them daddy. 

Basically Genius engineers got suspicious when the song "Panda" (sample lyric: Panda…Panda PandaPandaPanda) was showing up in Google boxes a certain way, that led them to believe that Google was just scraping their site.  The problem is — which you know if you've ever Googled lyrics before — those Google lyrics show up first in the search, ABOVE the Genius.com links.  So if you just want the lyrics and don't care how you view them or consume them, there would be literally no reason to scroll to another option, even if it's #2.  Which obviously costs them clicks and traffic, which costs them literal money and revenue.  So it's not just a pride thing, it's very clearly affecting the business. 

So the Genius geniuses did what's basically the equivalent of watermarking a picture, but on text — they used a combination of curly and straight apostrophes in 271 random songs, then checked how they showed up on Google. And just to stunt: they made it so those changes spelled out "REDHANDED" when translated into Morse Code. (Don't ask me to explain that more, I don't know.) 

The Wall Street Journal covered this apostrophe thing back in June, which obviously embarrassed Google. But Genius wasn't convinced that they would just stop because they got caught, so they did it AGAIN.

This time, they got even sneakier, and used two different "space characters" that ONLY computers can pick up on, not human eyes. 

After noticing the apostrophe pattern had disappeared from information boxes, Genius says it devised a new watermark in August using two different space characters that computers, but not humans, can tell apart. The company found that watermark in lyrics boxes that were missing the “REDHANDED” apostrophes, the lawsuit says.

Busted twice! One time you can pretend it was an honest mistake. Two times is just flaunting how you control the internet and the world and will have us all living in a Black Mirror Metalhead episode in the very near future.