Google’s Genius Lyrics Spat Merits DOJ Response, High Court Says

The US Supreme Court on Monday asked the solicitor general to take a position on whether it should step into a dispute over Google LLC’s alleged illegal scraping of lyrics from music annotation website Genius, in a case that could potentially implicate a range of business models built for the internet.

The case concerns what legal experts have said is an unresolved tension between copyright law and the terms of service agreements used by most websites.

Genius, which uses crowd sourcing to transcribe the lyrics of millions of songs, is arguing that Google violated the website’s terms of service by ...