10 ms·
Google doesn't recognise or penalise stolen content
- tomschlick 11y agoAnd they shouldn't. Thats not their job.
- scriptproof 11y agoAs it is not the job of the street vendor to know from where come these Rolex.
- smt88 11y agoI don't know if you're being sarcastic, but it is illegal to sell stolen or fake merchandise in the United States. Anyone selling fake Rolexes is committing a crime and could also be sued. Saying that Google is "selling" stolen content isn't that clear, though. Yes, they're selling ads on search results, but wouldn't they get the same ad revenue regardless of where those links pointed? It's easier to make the case with AdSense, where Google literally profits directly from stolen content.
- PhantomGremlin 11y agoit is illegal to sell stolen or fake merchandise in the United States. Anyone selling fake Rolexes is committing a crime and could also be sued Huh? Now I'm worried. Are you telling me that the Rolex watch I paid $30 for, that I bought from a street vendor near Times Square, might be fake? Oh no, the horror! /sarcasm I don't think that Rolex is too worried about this. Nobody would mistake a $30 watch for a real Rolex. And, give it credit, my fake Rolex worked for a year or so. It probably just needs a new battery. Besides, you can't sue a street vendor. They're what's known as "judgement proof".[1] And as to police action against them, the de Blasio administration seems to have adopted a laissez-faire attitude about all this stuff. If they're willing to allow squeegee men to operate with impunity, they certainly won't care about novelty watches being peddled. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_proof https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judgement_proof
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- JoshTriplett 11y agoTheir job is, however, to direct people to the most relevant pages.
- cwyers 11y agoWhat is their job? I thought it was as a search engine. So, let me ask -- when people steal blog content, what are their motives for doing so? Is it to deliver that content to you, the reader? Or is it to get Google hits? How well are they preserving links, illustrations, reader comments (which are a disaster a lot of places but not all of them), an archive of other work by the same author that may be of interest? How often are they slipping undesirable things (ads that lead to sites that offer malware, for instance) alongside the content they're stealing? If Google wants to be the best search engine possible, returning the original result for an article relevant to the user's query is a better result than returning some second-hand copy littered with low-quality ad junk. And if that's not Google job, then let me know whose job it is and I'll start using them instead.
- jeremy7600 11y agoAdvertisement post?
- mikkom 11y agoYes but a very interesting one.
- bpodgursky 11y agoI think this is pretty fair on Google's part. How could you possibly figure out who owned content? What if I published a book, it was copy-pasted in blogs, and then later I put it somewhere crawlable by Google? You certainly can't just say "first time we saw it, that's the proper owner". It would either require a massive amount of manual QA to get right (and even then, there are going to be interminable copyright battles), or have a super high error rate. I think Google's best value is letting proper content owners easily find violators via normal searches, and let them deal with them via takedown notices or the court system -- which is where it should be done, not in a pseudo-court run by a Google who does not want what responsibility.
- zaroth 11y agoEven if you don't care about trying to identify the original source of some piece of content, it seems like the content farm site which is plagiarizing is more likely to be a lower quality site than the original content producer. The behavior does seem weird in any case, like there is a certain slot for a given piece of content, and Google is swapping different domains in and out to fill that slot. It seems like Google is actually trying to identify the original content, failing, and then actually inadvertently penalizing the original producer.
- scholia 11y agoWell, Google has already indexed a new article x. When article y appears, and Google sees that y is an almost verbatim repeat of x, it shouldn't be that hard to figure out that article x is the original, should it? Especially if they both have time/date stamps....
- alwaysdoit 11y agoAlso all of this is assuming that any duplicated content is inherently stolen, when it could in fact be public domain, fair use, legitimately licensed, distributed under Creative Commons, etc.
- blfr 11y ago
- deleted 11y ago[deleted]
- sismoc 11y agoThere is no such thing as "Stolen" content.
- smt88 11y agoIf that's true, there's also no such thing as "stealing" at all. Consider a novelist who works for 10 years on her novel. A hacker steals the document from her computer and publishes it online under his own name. He makes $100M. Is it wrong for the novelist to feel like someone stole from her? What word would you use instead?
- anonyfox 11y agoThe book has not yet been published, so this is stealing. But once you put up something in the internet, it is officially available to everyone. Doing stuff with public information is fine IMO. Same as analyzing tweet data (tweets are public).
- smt88 11y agoWhat if the book has been published in paper form? The book is public as long as you pay for it. Since internet isn't free, you're still paying for content. At what point are you paying "enough" that the information isn't public anymore? Are you saying no one should monetize their content using ads unless they're willing to allow anyone else to do that as well?
- aaronwall 11y agoIt is worth pointing out just how pissed off Google engineers were publicly when they felt Bing was copying their search results. https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses-google-search.html https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/microsofts-bing-uses... http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-our-search-results-62914 http://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying-...
- jsizz 11y ago
- Animats 11y agoThis came up before on YC.[1] Google does have a system to detect provenance, but you have to report your changes to Google as an RSS feed.[2] Google hasn't updated that page since 2010, and it may no longer do anything. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103545 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10103545 [2] https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/ https://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com/
- DarkLinkXXXX 11y agoThis may be pedantic, but is stolen the right word to use? I think plagiarized is more accurate.
- smt88 11y agoPlagiarism can also apply to copying content without using the exact same wording. In my mind, "stolen" means copying verbatim. Plagiarism comes from a word meaning "kidnapping" though, so the tone of both words is pretty similar.
- johansch 11y agoStolen implies that the original owner no longer has access to the data due to the actions of the perpetrator.
- bduerst 11y agoFor physical property, yes. For intellectual property, it can still be stolen even if the original owner still has a copy. e.g. The Soviet spies stole the plans for the hydrogen bomb.
- johansch 11y agoAh, so you mean the actual blueprints? And the poor Americans had no copies? How stupid of them!
- Natanael_L 11y agoSo... copied.
- tbrownaw 11y agoNo, for intellectual property the word "stolen" is not appropriate. (Well, unless you're talking about getting the courts to tell the original owner it's yours instead. Which has been at least attempted a few times.)
- hlmencken 11y agoThis is not stealing, and even if it is illegal that is a bad way to put it. Also, google's service is primarily to the searcher so this isn't a huge issue for them.
- smt88 11y ago> google's service is primarily to the searcher You are very wrong. For many years, nearly 100% of Google's revenue was from AdSense. What if someone spends days writing an article and posts it on his blog. Then, someone else copies and pastes it onto BuzzFeed, which becomes the top search result for that topic. BuzzFeed is making money that the same blogger would have made from his own content. Now, also assume Google serves ads to BuzzFeed, but it does not serve ads to the blogger. Google has a financial interest in ignoring the provenance of the content in this case. Is all of that ethically acceptable?
- magicalist 11y ago> For many years, nearly 100% of Google's revenue was from AdSense Google has always gotten a very large majority of its advertising revenue from ads on its own sites, not on third party sites.
- morgante 11y ago> You are very wrong. For many years, nearly 100% of Google's revenue was from AdSense. That's incredibly untrue. A substantial portion of Google's revenue has always been and continues to be from first-party AdWords ads. The fact that you're using BuzzFeed as an example, a firm which emphatically does not use display ads, shows how little you know about this.
- 55555 11y agoI was huge into SEO for a few years. I try to stay out of it now, but it's worth noting that this is almost certainly due to the current algorithm's obsession with "freshness." The weaker site is ranking higher with the stolen content because their site was updated more recently. Steal some back and I bet they swap ranks again. Also, the combination of the pagerank algorithm and normal user behavior typically helps Google to understand who was first and who deserves to rank higher. That is, most people don't plagiarize content, they quote it and then cite the source, which (thanks to pagerank) tends to rank the original better than sites which have plagiarized it.
- scholia 11y ago> the current algorithm's obsession with "freshness." Which is how Google makes blogspam such a good business to be in, even if your content is inferior to the post you used for "research".
- 55555 11y agoMost of the spam I see in the wild these days is indeed (established) dropped domains which were picked up and then loaded with thousands of pages of "fresh" spun content, with an incestuous backlink profile if any. So indeed 'blogspam'. Everything old is new again; it feels just like twelve years ago. Soon people will be keyword stuffing in a font the same color as the background... But Google certainly isn't intending to make blogspam a good business to be in, and I'd argue that they aren't; over the past four years Demand Media's stockprice has fallen from $400/share to $4, and the general marketplace for commoditized SEO services has shrunk by a similar degree over the same period. 19 out of every 20 SEOs who were active five years ago have thrown in the towel... just check alexa graphs for the top SEO forums. The SERPs are clean these days. Google has done an amazing job every year for at least thirteen years now of improving them constantly. The new wave of spam is social. In practice this means Buzzfeed writers stealing user-produced content from AskReddit threads and it ending up polluting my Facebook feed to the point that I can't even find any good counterfeit Raybans.
- aaronwall 11y ago
- nkozyra 11y agoRecognizing "stolen" content autonomously can only pivot on knowing when something was first published or visible to Google, which is a pretty dubious measurement.
- matt_morgan 11y agoBut the weird thing is the stolen content, even when it's on a crappier site with no shares etc., knocking the original out of its slot. I.e., something (probably freshness) is causing the stolen content on the crappy site to be higher-ranked than the original content on the strong site. That seems avoidable (and in Google's best interest).
- 6stringmerc 11y agoIs this any better/worse than Facebook actively trying to profit and win over users when people or organizations copy / upload / soak up views for material they did not create and don't have the rights to use? Because that's a hot-point of discussion in some creative circles as well.
- Houshalter 11y agoFacebook's freebooting is pretty terrible. But this can destroy entire websites. The title is misleading. Google isn't just not punishing thieves, it's heavily punishing the originals. They dropped from 20th result, to 100+, because someone stole their content.
- 6stringmerc 11y agoYikes! That is much worse, at least based on your note. Do you think this is an area where the EFF could litigate on behalf of the original creators in a fraud context? Just curious, and also grateful to not be dealing with such a horrible prospect.
- randyrand 11y agoThe title should more accurately be Google search. Many parts of Google, for instance Youtube definitely do penalize stolen content.
- walshemj 11y agoI have had a site that had UGC spam promoting dodgy TV streams - get hit with a penalty.
- Daneel_ 11y agoWhat a rubbish article.. It doesn't fly for a second under copyright law. Google is entirely within their rights doing what they're doing. The onus isn't on Google to detect the infringing content. For anyone interested in copyright and legal issues, I'd recommend checking out techdirt.com. They have a great starter section at https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=techdirt+feature https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=techdirt+feature, and they cover legal, copyright, patent, surveillance and all sorts of related topics. High quality journalism.
- jakeogh 11y agoIt's downright tragic to ask for more rules.