4 ms·

Are you proposing that the entire concept of a non-human-curated search engine should be illegal? Seems kind of silly.

munk-a 3y ago
It honestly doesn't seem outrageous to me. Just because this is the direction society has decided to go in doesn't make the alternative absurd. If you'll recall in the early age of the internet hand-curated link boards were actually extremely popular i.e. "I'm Billy and here's a bunch of really interesting information about sewage treatment" and then just a spam of links. I think there's a very reasonable argument to be made that Google should simply link to the information and not extract and re-present the information that would be much fairer in enabling websites to support themselves. If the content you're creating is stolen and reposted elsewhere you're losing that portion of revenue and Google's news strategy has driven click throughs to the actual articles way down which reduces ad revenue and discourages subscription. As a general rule, not being willing to entertain a state other than the way things currently are, is a bad habit to get into.
GeekyBear 3y ago
Did you miss the part where I said people are conflating indexing a story on a search engine with "borrowing" other people's content for your own news site? The first can be fixed with a simple robots.txt file. How do you tell Google they may index your story, but may not "borrow" your headline or photos for their own news site?
- warning26 3y ago
  Showing the title is "borrowing" content? How are you supposed to refer to the site without the title? The raw URL? Imagine if book publishers sued bookstores for showing titles of their books.
  - GeekyBear 3y ago
    > How are you supposed to refer to the site without the title? By following the example I gave previously and only using the name of the news site and not any of it's content? > Hire a human being to write headlines in their own words and then link to articles in the press discussing that story. > "Man Bites Dog" More discussion: CBC, National Post, Toronto Star, CTV, etc. In that example, "Man Bites Dog" was the headline written by an employee on Google's dime, and then you have a list of links that do not "borrow" any of the target website's text or images. Since it's common case law that a mere link is not illegal, I don't see how a law banning a link (without using content that does not belong to you) would stand up in Canadian courts given the free speech guarantees in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

It honestly doesn't seem outrageous to me. Just because this is the direction society has decided to go in doesn't make the alternative absurd. If you'll recall in the early age of the internet hand-curated link boards were actually extremely popular i.e. "I'm Billy and here's a bunch of really interesting information about sewage treatment" and then just a spam of links. I think there's a very reasonable argument to be made that Google should simply link to the information and not extract and re-present the information that would be much fairer in enabling websites to support themselves. If the content you're creating is stolen and reposted elsewhere you're losing that portion of revenue and Google's news strategy has driven click throughs to the actual articles way down which reduces ad revenue and discourages subscription. As a general rule, not being willing to entertain a state other than the way things currently are, is a bad habit to get into.

GeekyBear 3y ago

Did you miss the part where I said people are conflating indexing a story on a search engine with "borrowing" other people's content for your own news site? The first can be fixed with a simple robots.txt file. How do you tell Google they may index your story, but may not "borrow" your headline or photos for their own news site?

warning26 3y ago
Showing the title is "borrowing" content? How are you supposed to refer to the site without the title? The raw URL? Imagine if book publishers sued bookstores for showing titles of their books.
- GeekyBear 3y ago
  > How are you supposed to refer to the site without the title? By following the example I gave previously and only using the name of the news site and not any of it's content? > Hire a human being to write headlines in their own words and then link to articles in the press discussing that story. > "Man Bites Dog" More discussion: CBC, National Post, Toronto Star, CTV, etc. In that example, "Man Bites Dog" was the headline written by an employee on Google's dime, and then you have a list of links that do not "borrow" any of the target website's text or images. Since it's common case law that a mere link is not illegal, I don't see how a law banning a link (without using content that does not belong to you) would stand up in Canadian courts given the free speech guarantees in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.