Let me get this straight. They crawl the entire web without explicit permission, only a weird opt-out process. They save a copy of all the copyrighted data on t

Let me get this straight. They crawl the entire web without explicit permission, only a weird opt-out process. They save a copy of all the copyrighted data on the entire web and preprocess it into a compressed form. Then in response to user requests they serve that copyrighted data directly to users, either paraphrased, quoted in small snippets, or even whole articles verbatim. Oh yes, Google Search is most definitely totally illegal. My point in saying this isn't just that search looks very similar to AI. A bigger point is that the same people making these arguments would have, and did, make those arguments against search. Imagine the world today if their lawsuits had been successful back in 1999 and building a search index had been deemed illegal. The world would not be a better place today.