Photo: Drew Angerer
According to The Wall Street Journal (via Rolling Stone), lyrics database Genius (formerly Rap Genius before it branched out into other genres) has accused Google of stealing its content and reposting it without permission, leading to a noticeable dip in Genius’ traffic that seems to coincide with an increased effort from Google to directly list song lyrics in search results instead of actually directing searchers to sites like Genius. Google can post all the song lyrics it wants to post, but Genius says it knows Google is stealing lyrics directly from its site because of a secret “Morse code” system that utilized two different kinds of apostrophes to spell out the words “red handed”—as in “you’ve been caught red-handed.”