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Taking someone else's copy written content and presenting it as your own can be seen as content theft. Imagine if a book author did that to a chapter of a book.
by mfer 6y ago
Taking someone else's copy written content and presenting it as your own can be seen as content theft. Imagine if a book author did that to a chapter of a book.
When the one doing it can essential present the case that they should be allowed to do it or they will destroy your business then it's an abuse of power. When they are in a position to actually do it because they have so much of the power in the space it can be argued to be a monopoly and abuse of monopoly power.
Google isn't just copying a number. They are copying text from other sites to present.
- teddyh 6y ago> Taking someone else's copy written content […] (You should read up a bit on this; it’s obvious you have not since you call it “copy written” when the term is “copyright” and a work can therefore be “copyrighted”. The term is about who has the right to copy a given work, and has nothing to do with “writing”.) Copying text someone else has written is indeed copyright infringement (commonly, but technically inaccurately, called “theft”). Except for the narrowly defined classes of copying called “fair use”, Google would indeed be breaking the law if they did that, but: > Google isn't just copying a number. They are copying text from other sites to present. That’s not what the topic was about, and therefore not what my comment was about. My comment concerned the specific case made by the PDF document, which was about Google copying individual dollar amounts, not text.
- bryanrasmussen 6y ago>(You should read up a bit on this; it’s obvious you have not since you call it “copy written” when the term is “copyright” and a work can therefore be “copyrighted”. The term is about who has the right to copy a given work, and has nothing to do with “writing”.) Perhaps the parent comment was from some country where things are different, like the language.
- teddyh 6y agoPerhaps, but this case was explicitly about US copyright, and may even hinge on the specific intricacies on whether database copyright in US law covers this specific case.
- hluska 6y ago> (You should read up a bit on this; it’s obvious you have not since you call it “copy written” when the term is “copyright” and a work can therefore be “copyrighted”. The term is about who has the right to copy a given work, and has nothing to do with “writing”.) You used someone’s grammar as a reason to piss all over a reasonable comment, merely because it didn’t 100% validate your own? You should read up a bit on basic human decency and even confidence. Otherwise, you just look like a know it all who can’t handle learning new things. That’s weak.
- teddyh 6y agoMaybe you should realize that merely commenting upon someone’s word choices, inferring inexperience, and providing some elucidation, is not the same as “piss all over”. I mean, nowhere did I say anything else negative about anything in mfer’s comment; I did not even disagree with anything they said! Ergo, please take your lecturing about “basic human decency” somewhere else.
- renlo 6y agoNAL and the only information I have is from a 2 credit intellectual property class I took in college, but facts (like dollar amounts) are not copyrightable, but curated collections of facts (like an almanac) are copyrightable. It seems this would fall under the latter category. Also from the LinkedIn - hiQ Labs lawsuit, it seems that unfair business practices are factored in. Google is implementing unfair business practices that stifle competition by taking the data to make a competing product.
- mfer 6y agoIANAL either. But, there is a difference between taking a straight dollar amount (a fact) and description written that includes the fact. If all Google did was display the dollar estimate that would be one thing. They go beyond that to include textual content pulled directly from sites.
- hyperdimension 6y agoThank you for not saying 'IANAL.' I can't help but to read it, uh, the 'other' way, and I always think "well there's nothing wrong with that, but why bring it up here?"
- 55555 6y agoCopywriting ("copy[,] written") is an industry term.
- teddyh 6y agoTrue, but that term means something completely different from what was discussed here, and the sentence does not make sense if you assume that meaning. It’s quite obvious to me that they, like many others, erroneously thought of “copyright” as “copywrite”.
- dumbfounder 6y agoIt's much less clear in this case. What about displaying the title of the website, is that ok? Just about everyone would say yes. What about the first few sentences of the page? Ok, I think we are good here, probably ok. What about an intelligent snippet of the website that highlights your search terms? Well, ok we are starting to get a bit gray, because now for some searches we don't need to go to the website anymore. But is it wrong or illegal? Well what about formatting that in a nice way that prominently displays the answer to your query? Well now we have an issue, but how big of a leap was it to get there? But is it wrong because they targeted the website and built parsers specifically for it, or because it is done at all? I don't know. But I think it was a slippery slope that got them there.