The crux of the legal decision here is that Genius doesn't own the copyright on the lyrics either. Hard to steal from Genius what they don't own in the first place.
Genius does give the tools to crowdsource lyrics, meanings, and comments. Google brought the rights to display lyrics but not lyrics themselves..they just steal that from other companies and rehost it with their own ads. Copyright law was not designed to handle this, which is something that is obviously morally wrong and will eventually harm consumers. Google has stated: 'if you don't want to be crawled, use Robots.txt' which because they have 90% market share, is clearly impossible for Genius. It's downright evil.
Downright evil seems like a stretch, especially given that Google doesn’t seem to have gotten the lyrics from scraping Genius and rather bought them from a third party who themselves scraped them from Genius. Whether or not Genius blocks googlebot in their robots.txt doesn’t actually seem to be relevant. But this does seem like a good case for the US to introduce “database rights” into copyright law to reward entities that assemble collections of otherwise-disparate information that they don’t own the copyright for, either because someone else does it because it’s something that cannot be copyrighted. Then Genius would have legitimate grounds to sue the third-party that scraped their lyrics. On the other hand, this would also had it existed have allowed Google to sue Bing back when it was first starting for piggybacking on Google’s search results. It’s not obvious to me that database rights are a good idea.
It perfectly fits their mission "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful".