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Google "never had to think about this (flouting the law) problem?" If by that you mean Google's OTA business, sure, but Google totally had to think about thi
by gregw2 6y ago
Google "never had to think about this (flouting the law) problem?"
If by that you mean Google's OTA business, sure, but
Google totally had to think about this problem in the context of their original core search engine business.
They did not ask for permission, they begged for forgiveness too, if you remember the early days.
They copied data from every website in existence to populate their search engine despite copyright laws, encouraged some sort of robots.txt opt-out mechanism while also ignoring the (AI-hard) need to parse legal terms of use on each website which may not have allowed their access.
Later on some laws were passed to justify what they did but it was not legally a settled matter when they (and other search engines) started. Copyright is not "opt-out" process; the RIAA doesn't publish a robots.txt with their content and if they forget you have a free pass for copying some song for yourself. Copying every single word on a webpage to make money is not so clearly "fair use".
I think it worked out OK, but Google totally thought a lot about this problem early on and they and other search engines tried hard to make everyone really comfortable with their approach.
- mox1 6y agoCompletely agree. Look at this older copyright lawsuit from 2010 about copyright and video games (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzard_Entertainment,_Inc https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDY_Industries,_LLC_v._Blizzar....) The court ruled that players of the game weren't owners, merely license holders. By copying the game to ram, you were bound to the Terms of Use. Replace game with website there and there is a pretty strong case for downloading, parsing (copying) and storing portions (or all of) said site, then displaying portions at a later date alongside advertisements constitutes a ToS violation, and willful infringement on Googles part. In a parallel world where yahoo, lycos, etc rules until 2010 and google is getting started, I think they get into a lot of legal trouble.
- gumby 6y ago> They copied data from every website in existence to populate their search engine despite copyright laws, encouraged some sort of robots.txt opt-out mechanism while also ignoring the (AI-hard) need to parse legal terms of use on each website which may not have allowed their access. As did every other search engine, and a good thing too. In general the principle of “if you don’t want people to see something don’t post it publicly” is a good principle that predates computers. As for robots.txt: don’t forget that it predated Google, even when g was just a grad school project. Nothing weird about it: we also specify how the http protocol works. Humans use “AI-hard” adaptive protocols and there’s no reason computers won’t in future, but they can’t yet and it’s not unreasonable to have to adapt to that. There are many many reasons to criticize Google but I think your argument is not one of them.