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> The people doing the hard work of making a dictionary deserve to serve those definitions under their own terms. This depends on the country. In the EU, this
by telotortium 7y ago
> The people doing the hard work of making a dictionary deserve to serve those definitions under their own terms.
This depends on the country. In the EU, this may be the case. However, the US Supreme Court rejected the "sweat of the brow" copyright doctrine in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._Rural_Telephone_Service_Co%46 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R.... For a creative expression to be copyrightable in the US, it must have some minimum threshold of originality.
The wording of dictionary definitions themselves may be copyrightable if sufficiently unique. But the question of fair use should be considered as well. If Google as a matter of policy always consulted a particular database for a particular class of searches, without permission from the copyright owner, perhaps one could argue that crosses the line of fair use. But for isolated results, it doesn't appear much different than the current practice of putting snippets of the page below the links in the search results. For more extensive databases, Google often has an explicit agreement with the database owner.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, I don't know anything about the implementation of the answer box, and certainly don't know the law in multiple jurisdictions.
- mthoms 7y agoIt sounds like you're looking for legal loopholes. Which is absolutely fine for a business to do. Just don't use phrases like "from a moral standpoint..." when you really mean "from a legal standpoint...". Moral and legal aren't the same thing.
- telotortium 7y agoI don't believe Google has a moral obligation to send traffic to the sites that appear in its search results, any more than a book has an obligation to be bought or borrowed from the library by the readers of a short quote from that book in another book. So, for me, it is a moral question as well.
- buboard 7y ago> don't believe Google has a moral obligation to send traffic Bizzare. The only reason google gets traffic is because of those sites. Your comparison is also off, google is not another book (they dont create content), it's the librarian telling people which book to borrow.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 7y agoIn your analogy of books, google is a book too. If google as a book dictionary was just a copy of your book dictionary, that would be illegal and wrong. You the reader are only looking at a single definition, which could be a plausible fair-use quote. But when google's entire dictionary is just fair-use quotes of your book, then they've just copied your book.