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Google was more aligned to making human communication searchable. Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin

by judge2020 5y ago

Google was more aligned to making human communication searchable. Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator)

perihelions 5y ago
In my view Google does a lot of analogous "rehostings" -- they just have a lot more lawyers and lobbyists to get away with it. Consider some of the places they tried and failed at this: the Google Images/Getty settlement; the YouTube/RIAA settlement; the fines and shutdowns of Google News snippets in multiple countries. Any one of these failures could plausibly destroy a smaller startup, or even send a person to prison. (I mean, Google News snippets -- isn't that just "deliberate copyright infringement on a massive scale", if you squint?) They're qualitatively not all that different from SciHub.
- musicale 5y ago
  > Google News snippets -- isn't that just "deliberate copyright infringement on a massive scale", if you squint News snippets seem analogous to thumbnails in image search. I imagine a fair use defense might be affected by 1) how much of the content is used (e.g. small abstracts vs. full articles) 2) whether the use is transformative (e.g. for an internet search index vs. in a virtual newspaper), and 3) whether the use is commercial (e.g. whether it's by Google or archive.org, and whether there are advertisements shown next to the snippets.)
  - perihelions 5y ago
    Well, sure! This boundary between what is and isn't legitimate in copyright law is a nebulous, culturally relative thing. That's the point I tried to make, by analogizing Google's legal problems with SciHub's. I agree that Google News snippet things are exactly what US "fair use" exemptions were written for, and are clearly a net public benefit. Some people don't; French law for instance definitively falls on the "deliberate infringement on a massive scale" side, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818667 ("France fines Google €500M over copyright row") Thesis: mainstream thinking overstates the moral difference between these two -- and understates the morality-distorting effect of money, lawyers, and lobbying.
_Nat_ 5y ago
> Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator) Academics generally value their work being made accessible. Paywalls that obstruct human progress are contemptible, and I suspect that most academics at least dislike them.
TeMPOraL 5y ago
> Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator) That's one of the few good things you can say about Google today. To me, the whole point of contention here is just an artifact of a serious problem with the web as a whole, a problem to which Google contributed thanks to their role in Internet advertising. The problem is: "content creators" have too much control over the form of what they put out there. That Google is taking some of that control, by republishing the data in a different form, is just a different flavor of the issue; whether it's the "content creators" or Google that control the form, it's not the end users. Right now, the fight is mostly between people peddling ad-infused, SEO-ridden garbage sites and Google rehosting the little real content their have in a half-assed, often wrong or improperly attributed, box on the results page. Both sides have strong, user-hostile reasons to be in this fight. Neither has "making knowledge accessible" in mind. To truly make knowledge accessible, it needs to be published in a machine-readable format and accessible as if through a database. Just like when building a database-backed system, you don't put React components into your database rows, and you don't render your frontend from stored procedures, accessing the "information superhighway" shouldn't involve navigating countless of web pages that wrap the information you need in tons of garbage (nor it should involve hoping that the magic Google box will pick up the correct bit to show you). You should be able to make queries, get the data without all the formatting fluff, and browse it through whatever client software you want - and then issue further queries. I mean, note how many successful startups out there exist only because publicly available information is not machine-readable, and all they do is scrapping, mixing, and republishing the data. E.g., in my country, there's a popular tool that tells you how to get from point A to point B using public transportation - but it only exists because the official time tables are published as web pages. It would not need to exist if you could just do an equivalent of arbitrary SQL query on the official data. But you can't, so you have to use that other tool whose vendor did the necessary scrapping work - and you can't get at the data itself in that tool either, because they have to lock it down to justify their existence. Sorry for the rant. I could go on and on. I might write a long blog post about it eventually. But in this context the point is that both "content creators" and Google know they're not acting in the best interest of the people. They're just fighting over the money printing machine.
- 5y ago

Google was more aligned to making human communication searchable. Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator)

perihelions 5y ago

In my view Google does a lot of analogous "rehostings" -- they just have a lot more lawyers and lobbyists to get away with it. Consider some of the places they tried and failed at this: the Google Images/Getty settlement; the YouTube/RIAA settlement; the fines and shutdowns of Google News snippets in multiple countries. Any one of these failures could plausibly destroy a smaller startup, or even send a person to prison. (I mean, Google News snippets -- isn't that just "deliberate copyright infringement on a massive scale", if you squint?) They're qualitatively not all that different from SciHub.

musicale 5y ago
> Google News snippets -- isn't that just "deliberate copyright infringement on a massive scale", if you squint News snippets seem analogous to thumbnails in image search. I imagine a fair use defense might be affected by 1) how much of the content is used (e.g. small abstracts vs. full articles) 2) whether the use is transformative (e.g. for an internet search index vs. in a virtual newspaper), and 3) whether the use is commercial (e.g. whether it's by Google or archive.org, and whether there are advertisements shown next to the snippets.)
- perihelions 5y ago
  Well, sure! This boundary between what is and isn't legitimate in copyright law is a nebulous, culturally relative thing. That's the point I tried to make, by analogizing Google's legal problems with SciHub's. I agree that Google News snippet things are exactly what US "fair use" exemptions were written for, and are clearly a net public benefit. Some people don't; French law for instance definitively falls on the "deliberate infringement on a massive scale" side, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818667 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27818667 ("France fines Google €500M over copyright row") Thesis: mainstream thinking overstates the moral difference between these two -- and understates the morality-distorting effect of money, lawyers, and lobbying.

_Nat_ 5y ago

> Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator) Academics generally value their work being made accessible. Paywalls that obstruct human progress are contemptible, and I suspect that most academics at least dislike them.

TeMPOraL 5y ago

> Now it’s about assimilating that information and actually making it available (to the chagrin of the content creator) That's one of the few good things you can say about Google today. To me, the whole point of contention here is just an artifact of a serious problem with the web as a whole, a problem to which Google contributed thanks to their role in Internet advertising. The problem is: "content creators" have too much control over the form of what they put out there. That Google is taking some of that control, by republishing the data in a different form, is just a different flavor of the issue; whether it's the "content creators" or Google that control the form, it's not the end users. Right now, the fight is mostly between people peddling ad-infused, SEO-ridden garbage sites and Google rehosting the little real content their have in a half-assed, often wrong or improperly attributed, box on the results page. Both sides have strong, user-hostile reasons to be in this fight. Neither has "making knowledge accessible" in mind. To truly make knowledge accessible, it needs to be published in a machine-readable format and accessible as if through a database. Just like when building a database-backed system, you don't put React components into your database rows, and you don't render your frontend from stored procedures, accessing the "information superhighway" shouldn't involve navigating countless of web pages that wrap the information you need in tons of garbage (nor it should involve hoping that the magic Google box will pick up the correct bit to show you). You should be able to make queries, get the data without all the formatting fluff, and browse it through whatever client software you want - and then issue further queries. I mean, note how many successful startups out there exist only because publicly available information is not machine-readable, and all they do is scrapping, mixing, and republishing the data. E.g., in my country, there's a popular tool that tells you how to get from point A to point B using public transportation - but it only exists because the official time tables are published as web pages. It would not need to exist if you could just do an equivalent of arbitrary SQL query on the official data. But you can't, so you have to use that other tool whose vendor did the necessary scrapping work - and you can't get at the data itself in that tool either, because they have to lock it down to justify their existence. Sorry for the rant. I could go on and on. I might write a long blog post about it eventually. But in this context the point is that both "content creators" and Google know they're not acting in the best interest of the people. They're just fighting over the money printing machine.

5y ago