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There seems to be a fairly clear distinction between importing copyrighted material to make an index for the narrow purpose of directing people towards the copy

There seems to be a fairly clear distinction between importing copyrighted material to make an index for the narrow purpose of directing people towards the copyrighted material at its original location in its original form, and importing copyrighted material to make an index which improves their own service's ability to generate unattributed derivative work. It's a bit muddier when it comes to things like image searches, but they're not exactly difficult to opt out of. Google actually pays license fees to News Corp to excerpt their content in Google News following a legal challenge so it's not exactly conclusively established that search engines have global rights to do what they do anyway. But search engines are mostly beneficial to contact creators rather than mostly competitive with them.

jameshart 3y ago
Google does its best, but there are limits to “directing people towards the copyrighted material at its original location in its original form” - not everything in the intellectual property world is ‘internet native’. The original form of a song lyric or a movie screenplay doesn’t have an ‘original location’ you can be directed to. You can be directed to various online sources that may or may not accurately reproduce the original, and may or may not be scrupulous about attribution, and may or may not have legitimate copyright license to distribute it in the first place.
- notahacker 3y ago
  Yes, Google will often unwittingly point to other people's copyright violations (it's useful like that!) and will usually only take down the cache/link when requested to do so by the copyright holder. This is irrelevant to original point about the purpose of a search engine being to highlight rather than replace existing information sources, and OpenAI's purpose for indexing content and policy of not engaging with copyright holders being completely different

jameshart 3y ago

Google does its best, but there are limits to “directing people towards the copyrighted material at its original location in its original form” - not everything in the intellectual property world is ‘internet native’. The original form of a song lyric or a movie screenplay doesn’t have an ‘original location’ you can be directed to. You can be directed to various online sources that may or may not accurately reproduce the original, and may or may not be scrupulous about attribution, and may or may not have legitimate copyright license to distribute it in the first place.

notahacker 3y ago
Yes, Google will often unwittingly point to other people's copyright violations (it's useful like that!) and will usually only take down the cache/link when requested to do so by the copyright holder. This is irrelevant to original point about the purpose of a search engine being to highlight rather than replace existing information sources, and OpenAI's purpose for indexing content and policy of not engaging with copyright holders being completely different