10 ms·

Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

341 points by cdrnsf 3mo ago

xbar 3mo ago
Hypocrisy-rich.
guardiangod 3mo ago
“You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen, and I think it quite ungentlemanly."
- Varelion 3mo ago
  This sums up every single bit of AI "progress" since 2022.
- throwaway87543 3mo ago
  Google crawling respects robots.txt and doesn't break capcha. It is easy to tell Google to piss off. SerpAPI fully relies on end-user proxies distributed like malware (in LG tv apps for instance), it has no other way it could function because it exclusively ingests data from sources that tell it to stop. If you wanted to scrape a bot friendly site, you wouldn't need SerpApi
  - horsawlarway 3mo ago
    I'm vaguely sympathetic to this argument. But only vaguely. Google uses its monopoly position in advertising to basically ensure that you allow them to scrape your site (or if not you personally, the majority of revenue driving sites). They have the benefit of being allowed by default. They also then scrape again at the user level for users operating chrome. They also conveniently ignore global blocks for their adsbots (you have to specifically name them to block them). If you're not Google, you likely don't have this luxury. My preference would be that governments force search indexes to be public. The exact mechanisms for this can be debated.
    - FireBeyond 3mo ago
      And they do specifically also scrape sites anonymously, ostensibly to ensure you don't serve different content to GoogleBot than users (though this is in my experience unreliable at best, and that's even before we get to the "do we trust that that's the only scope?").
  - awad 3mo ago
    The question I have that no one has really answered is...what kind of crawling have the current frontier labs done historically and what are they continuing to do now for training? Inference can follow rules easily, but the training is a big black box that mostly gets headlines for books getting slashed but that's not the only source of data is it?
ChrisArchitect 3mo ago
Source: Google vs. SerpApi: The Court Granted Our Motion to Dismiss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995411
thisislife2 3mo ago
I am somewhat confused - does this mean we can all now legally scrape Google search results?
- rgrieselhuber 3mo ago
  Always has been
- lazide 3mo ago
  Legally and ‘they won’t do everything they can to stop you’ are not the same thing of course.
jonatron 3mo ago
It's quite important that SERPs are scrapeable, because they keep advertising scams like ETA/ESTA sites: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957
- cwmoore 3mo ago
  [dead]
- Terr_ 3mo ago
  It's interesting to imagine how the world would be different, if internet advertising giants were partially liable for scams/malware that they facilitate.
  - asdefghyk 3mo ago
    I recall a articale I read "somewhere" that reported the Facebook makes big profit (Billions) from scams. So they have no ( or no strong motive) motive to shut such scams down An example is courtcase against Meta for using a Australians mining billionares likeness to promote a crypo investment scam. https://www.afr.com/technology/dad-it-s-a-fraud-call-that-sparked-forrest-s-60m-war-on-facebook-20260409-p5zml9 https://www.afr.com/technology/dad-it-s-a-fraud-call-that-sp...
    - bluGill 3mo ago
      I'm surprised legitimate companies don't pressure Facebook on this though. There are enough scams on Facebook that I now refuse to believe anything there, even though some of the things look useful and probably are not scams (and also are things I didn't know existed without an ad - thus filling one of the legitimate values of advertisements: informing me of things that would make my life better but I don't know exist).
      - FireBeyond 3mo ago
        Anyone making a Kickstarter knows that within days if not hours all your images, pictures, renderings will be harvested and dozens of "copycat" sites will be "selling" your product now, regardless of whether its a real thing or not yet, and they'll be advertising it on FB and IG. I say those words in quotes - they have no intention of shipping you anything, just skimming low-hanging fruit from someone's ideas.
binarymax 3mo ago
I'd be more OK with this if Google had a good API for their search results. But they've deprecated it, and now there is no alternative. So I'll continue to use 3rd parties that scrape Google results, until they change their mind.
- mark_l_watson 3mo ago
  I agree, then need to bring back Nelson Minar’s old search API, or something like it. Google does supply search grounding with Gemini API calls, and that is handy, but not general enough.
  - wwind123 3mo ago
    Last time I looked into this (about a month ago), there's a lot of restrictions on the use of Gemini's search grounding results. There's not even an easy or approved way to de-mangle their returned URL's to get to the real URL of the search results. Has that changed recently?
    - binarymax 3mo ago
      I haven't used it but they were silly about their programmatic search api in the same way. Can't use the results for anything other than showing them as-is on a results page.
- nicce 3mo ago
  I wonder how this changes things (EU forces to share search data): https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/eu-forces-google-share-search-data-open-android-134811713 https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/eu-forces-google-sh...
  - benoau 3mo ago
    Doesn't the US too, following Google's antitrust loss last year? > Judge Mehta said in the 223-page ruling that Google must share some of its search data with “qualified competitors” to resolve its monopoly. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-antitrust-decision.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-...
super256 3mo ago
If only GPT wouldn't refuse my requests to write a crawler for $site. :(
- john01dav 3mo ago
  Gemini has been perfectly willing to write such things for me
  - qingcharles 3mo ago
    Grok Build won't even question it. You gotta weigh that Grok use up, though.
- el_io 3mo ago
  It did for me, even without an account. Is that because I don't have an account and I'm accessing some weak model with little guardrails?
  - super256 2mo ago
    I don't know! I recently tried to download all posts by Matt Levine for a funny analysis, but GPT wouldn't let me do it.
raychis 3mo ago
[dead]
paul7986 3mo ago
What about them taking content for their AI summaries? Have they created a system that gets content owners and creators paid in this regard yet?
- layer8 3mo ago
  These are still open: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_2964 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_... https://www.epceurope.eu/post/european-publishers-council-files-formal-antitrust-complaint-against-google-over-ai-overviews-and-ai https://www.epceurope.eu/post/european-publishers-council-fi...
  - paul7986 3mo ago
    Yes, it will take legal action in Europe and or when the U.S. switches back with more democrats in power to force them to start paying their fair share. It behooves them to create systems that gets content creators paid as without content AI can not stay relevant. It also behooves entrepreneurs and technologists to create systems that solves this issue.
- WarmWash 3mo ago
  But not loading ads will save the Internet! Bypassing ads is good!
beloch 3mo ago
This ruling might feel good viscerally, but it also reinforces Googles own scraping as perfectly legal. At its inception, Google probably viewed this lawsuit as win-win. Either they successfully sue a competitor into oblivion or establish a precedent that will protect themselves in the future. Google lost, but they still won.
- echelon 3mo ago
  Google has no moat anymore. - Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore. - Coding models make doing extreme depth of work possible. - Hoards of unemployed engineers now have access to 10x coding utilities and are looking for things to do. They will start clawing away at Google products. - Just the other day, someone cloned Google Gsuite and it looked awesome - Drive and Search will also be fungible products - I'm itching at the chance to build my own phone operating system, and there must be thousands of others who want to do the same. - Chrome can probably be replaced (Firefox gained a whole percentage point last month) I don't think Google is safe anymore. Two caveats that I'll give them: - YouTube still has network effects and probably can't be dislodged - Google cloud isn't going anywhere
  - BeetleB 3mo ago
    > Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore. What do they use? Of all my tech friends, colleagues, I'm the only one who uses Kagi. Another person uses searx. Everyone else uses Google. Of my non-tech friends and colleagues, everyone uses Google.
    - worik 3mo ago
      > Of my non-tech friends and colleagues, everyone uses Google. Me, almost, too. I have some friends using duckduckgo - not many and only until Google is the default again...
      - SoftTalker 3mo ago
Imustaskforhelp 3mo ago
(IANAL) I think that the deeper thing from this lawsuit is that from my understanding, (inherently) Search engines are considered public indexes and the data (URL's,index) behind it is considered uncopyrighted and as such aren't protected by DMCA because DMCA only works for copyrighted contents and thus the dismissal of the lawsuit by the Judge. Basically, search engines are publicly scrapable, though I do wonder as from a law point of view, that it must be within the murky waters as to what a search engine means in terms of seperating its search engine code/its recomendation engine and the public data much of which are intertwined with each other. I believe that the argument that could be made is that the recommendation engine is the way it is because of all the data and its unseperable to really copyright the whole mechanism in all its glory. Speaking of which, it seems that AI models feel really similar. Does this judge lawsuit show that AI model weights aren't copyrightable as well? If a search engine is built on public indexes then so are the AI models. I was just writing similar comment on another thread but it seems to be the case, definitely worth a blog article or thinking more about perhaps this judgement by this judge itself in general as well, I just have a vibe that this judgement has pretty far reaching consequences in its impact.
- torisima 3mo ago
  In that case, even if using a service violates its terms of service, distilling its AI output is not necessarily illegal under the law.
dmix 3mo ago
DMCA needs to be reformed one day.
- throwaway613746 3mo ago
  Copyright should be abolished.
  - inigyou 3mo ago
    That would probably cause some kind of massive economic shock and/or collapse at this point. But we can think about how to improve it.
    - throwaway613746 3mo ago
      [dead]
  - wavemode 3mo ago
    No, but it should only last 10 years or so. Copyright in general is good as it provides economic incentive to produce new creative works. But copyright lasting or exceeding the length of people's lifetimes has done more harm than good to society. By that time, you have long since passed over from incentivizing creators, into enabling rent-seeking corporations.
- krupan 3mo ago
  That's not news to me, but this article was a really good reminder of how awful that law is. How have we not gotten it fixed yet??
akrymski 3mo ago
EU protects a database creator if there has been a qualitative or quantitative "substantial investment" in obtaining, verifying, or presenting the content, regardless of creative expression. In USA copyright requires a minimum degree of original creativity in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of the data. I think it's a rather grey line to say that Google search results are just facts, but eg maps are copyrightable. There's a rather large amount of effort involved in crawling and ranking the web - the PageRank itself should be copyrightable.
- altcognito 3mo ago
  They definitely started blowing through that line when they started serving up content answers as results.
- dataflow 3mo ago
  > I think it's a rather grey line to say that Google search results are just facts, but eg maps are copyrightable. I don't think a map is a good example. A picture is probably a better one. A map, by its very definition, is not a replica of any part of the original artifact. Not merely because a map is not the territory, but also because it's not even a direct, unaltered view of the thing. There is clearly some creativity required in putting together a map, since it requires you to decide what to include, what to leave out, what to exaggerate, what to distort, etc... as evidenced by maps of the same area looking vastly different. By contrast, search engine results are stitchings of various pieces of the text on the page, verbatim. How much creativity that embidies is probably akin to that within a photo.
  - whaleofatw2022 3mo ago
    Where it gets tricky is that, at least in past US case law, 'maps are facts' and thus cannot be copyrighted as easily (this is part of why published maps often have intentional, hopefully subtle errors in them) [0] [0] - I believe a specific case was Nintendo vs Prima publishing, which was even involving a map of a fictitious construct.
    - 3mo ago
SoftTalker 3mo ago
> The whole thing was just “we don’t like that this is happening, so we’re suing.” Typical behavior from a big company with immense resources. They probably thought they would get a settlement or SerpAPI could not afford to fight. I assume they are pretty small, at least in comparison to Google (I've never heard of them). Google has so much money that even a "loser pays" requirement on litigation probably would not disuade them.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  SerpAPI is probably paid by most of the marketing industry to monitor their own position in Google results. And those guys seem to have unlimited money.
dude250711 3mo ago
Having good thoughts about Google is kind of nostalgic!
stefan_lec 3mo ago
Where’s my nanometer-sized violin? Always losing that darn thing …
- cryo32 3mo ago
  Mine is worn out.
- probably_wrong 3mo ago
  I may have a smaller one. I don't know exactly where it is, but at least I know exactly how fast it's moving.
- RobotToaster 3mo ago
  A tardigrade stole mine.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
1saadcodes 3mo ago
The irony is that Google's success was built on crawling and indexing the open web. I understand wanting to protect your product, but once you remove affordable APIs and then object to third parties filling that gap, you're creating demand for the very behavior you're trying to discourage
- ralfd 3mo ago
  I dont get the irony. Google respects if one doesnt want to get indexed by the crawler: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/block-indexing https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
  - moribunda 3mo ago
    And it has from the start, right?
- inigyou 3mo ago
  Pulling up the ladder behind you is a tale as old as capitalism.
luciana1u 3mo ago
[flagged]
1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago
Missing from this blog post is that the suit was filed because OpenAI was using SerpApi to collect Google search results Alphabet is an Anthropic investor Looking forward to the Amended Complaint by August 10 https://searchengineland.com/inside-google-searchguard-467676 https://searchengineland.com/inside-google-searchguard-46767...
jeffybefffy519 3mo ago
I think this case is clearly directed at OpenAI and Anthropic, how do you think those guys get google results when the model searches for things for live data....
nexustoken 3mo ago
[flagged]
SerpApi 3mo ago
SerpApi employee here. We published our perspective on the dismissal, including why we think the ruling matters for companies that rely on access to public web data: https://serpapi.com/blog/google-v-serpapi-the-court-granted-our-motion-to-dismiss/ https://serpapi.com/blog/google-v-serpapi-the-court-granted-...
crawfordmarch 2mo ago
[flagged]
1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago
From Order dismissing Google's complaint: "Accordingly, the Court cannot reasonably infer that such licensing agreements grant Google authorization to deploy technological measures to control access to the copyrighted content at issue." "Under Iqbal's plausibility standard, Google must, but has not, alleged factual matter that raises the inference that copyright owners authorized the implementation of SearchGuard as a technological measure to control access to copyrighted content. Allegations that Google has licenses to display copyrighted content in the Knowledge Panel are not sufficient, without more, to raise that inference." Is the "Knowledge Panel" (KP) in SERPs comprised of copyrighted content If yes, do KP licensing agreements grant Google authorization to deploy technological measures to control access to the copyrighted content https://www.stackmatix.com/blog/how-to-get-google-knowledge-panel https://www.stackmatix.com/blog/how-to-get-google-knowledge-...

341 points by cdrnsf 3mo ago

xbar 3mo ago

Hypocrisy-rich.

guardiangod 3mo ago

“You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen, and I think it quite ungentlemanly."

Varelion 3mo ago
This sums up every single bit of AI "progress" since 2022.
throwaway87543 3mo ago
Google crawling respects robots.txt and doesn't break capcha. It is easy to tell Google to piss off. SerpAPI fully relies on end-user proxies distributed like malware (in LG tv apps for instance), it has no other way it could function because it exclusively ingests data from sources that tell it to stop. If you wanted to scrape a bot friendly site, you wouldn't need SerpApi
- horsawlarway 3mo ago
  I'm vaguely sympathetic to this argument. But only vaguely. Google uses its monopoly position in advertising to basically ensure that you allow them to scrape your site (or if not you personally, the majority of revenue driving sites). They have the benefit of being allowed by default. They also then scrape again at the user level for users operating chrome. They also conveniently ignore global blocks for their adsbots (you have to specifically name them to block them). If you're not Google, you likely don't have this luxury. My preference would be that governments force search indexes to be public. The exact mechanisms for this can be debated.
  - FireBeyond 3mo ago
    And they do specifically also scrape sites anonymously, ostensibly to ensure you don't serve different content to GoogleBot than users (though this is in my experience unreliable at best, and that's even before we get to the "do we trust that that's the only scope?").
- awad 3mo ago
  The question I have that no one has really answered is...what kind of crawling have the current frontier labs done historically and what are they continuing to do now for training? Inference can follow rules easily, but the training is a big black box that mostly gets headlines for books getting slashed but that's not the only source of data is it?

ChrisArchitect 3mo ago

Source: Google vs. SerpApi: The Court Granted Our Motion to Dismiss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995411 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995411

thisislife2 3mo ago

I am somewhat confused - does this mean we can all now legally scrape Google search results?

rgrieselhuber 3mo ago
Always has been
lazide 3mo ago
Legally and ‘they won’t do everything they can to stop you’ are not the same thing of course.

jonatron 3mo ago

It's quite important that SERPs are scrapeable, because they keep advertising scams like ETA/ESTA sites: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957

cwmoore 3mo ago
[dead]
Terr_ 3mo ago
It's interesting to imagine how the world would be different, if internet advertising giants were partially liable for scams/malware that they facilitate.
- asdefghyk 3mo ago
  I recall a articale I read "somewhere" that reported the Facebook makes big profit (Billions) from scams. So they have no ( or no strong motive) motive to shut such scams down An example is courtcase against Meta for using a Australians mining billionares likeness to promote a crypo investment scam. https://www.afr.com/technology/dad-it-s-a-fraud-call-that-sparked-forrest-s-60m-war-on-facebook-20260409-p5zml9 https://www.afr.com/technology/dad-it-s-a-fraud-call-that-sp...
  - bluGill 3mo ago
    I'm surprised legitimate companies don't pressure Facebook on this though. There are enough scams on Facebook that I now refuse to believe anything there, even though some of the things look useful and probably are not scams (and also are things I didn't know existed without an ad - thus filling one of the legitimate values of advertisements: informing me of things that would make my life better but I don't know exist).
    - FireBeyond 3mo ago
      Anyone making a Kickstarter knows that within days if not hours all your images, pictures, renderings will be harvested and dozens of "copycat" sites will be "selling" your product now, regardless of whether its a real thing or not yet, and they'll be advertising it on FB and IG. I say those words in quotes - they have no intention of shipping you anything, just skimming low-hanging fruit from someone's ideas.

binarymax 3mo ago

I'd be more OK with this if Google had a good API for their search results. But they've deprecated it, and now there is no alternative. So I'll continue to use 3rd parties that scrape Google results, until they change their mind.

mark_l_watson 3mo ago
I agree, then need to bring back Nelson Minar’s old search API, or something like it. Google does supply search grounding with Gemini API calls, and that is handy, but not general enough.
- wwind123 3mo ago
  Last time I looked into this (about a month ago), there's a lot of restrictions on the use of Gemini's search grounding results. There's not even an easy or approved way to de-mangle their returned URL's to get to the real URL of the search results. Has that changed recently?
  - binarymax 3mo ago
    I haven't used it but they were silly about their programmatic search api in the same way. Can't use the results for anything other than showing them as-is on a results page.
nicce 3mo ago
I wonder how this changes things (EU forces to share search data): https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/eu-forces-google-share-search-data-open-android-134811713 https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/eu-forces-google-sh...
- benoau 3mo ago
  Doesn't the US too, following Google's antitrust loss last year? > Judge Mehta said in the 223-page ruling that Google must share some of its search data with “qualified competitors” to resolve its monopoly. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-antitrust-decision.html https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/technology/google-search-...

super256 3mo ago

If only GPT wouldn't refuse my requests to write a crawler for $site. :(

john01dav 3mo ago
Gemini has been perfectly willing to write such things for me
- qingcharles 3mo ago
  Grok Build won't even question it. You gotta weigh that Grok use up, though.
el_io 3mo ago
It did for me, even without an account. Is that because I don't have an account and I'm accessing some weak model with little guardrails?
- super256 2mo ago
  I don't know! I recently tried to download all posts by Matt Levine for a funny analysis, but GPT wouldn't let me do it.

raychis 3mo ago

[dead]

paul7986 3mo ago

What about them taking content for their AI summaries? Have they created a system that gets content owners and creators paid in this regard yet?

layer8 3mo ago
These are still open: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_2964 https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_... https://www.epceurope.eu/post/european-publishers-council-files-formal-antitrust-complaint-against-google-over-ai-overviews-and-ai https://www.epceurope.eu/post/european-publishers-council-fi...
- paul7986 3mo ago
  Yes, it will take legal action in Europe and or when the U.S. switches back with more democrats in power to force them to start paying their fair share. It behooves them to create systems that gets content creators paid as without content AI can not stay relevant. It also behooves entrepreneurs and technologists to create systems that solves this issue.
WarmWash 3mo ago
But not loading ads will save the Internet! Bypassing ads is good!

beloch 3mo ago

This ruling might feel good viscerally, but it also reinforces Googles own scraping as perfectly legal. At its inception, Google probably viewed this lawsuit as win-win. Either they successfully sue a competitor into oblivion or establish a precedent that will protect themselves in the future. Google lost, but they still won.

echelon 3mo ago
Google has no moat anymore. - Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore. - Coding models make doing extreme depth of work possible. - Hoards of unemployed engineers now have access to 10x coding utilities and are looking for things to do. They will start clawing away at Google products. - Just the other day, someone cloned Google Gsuite and it looked awesome - Drive and Search will also be fungible products - I'm itching at the chance to build my own phone operating system, and there must be thousands of others who want to do the same. - Chrome can probably be replaced (Firefox gained a whole percentage point last month) I don't think Google is safe anymore. Two caveats that I'll give them: - YouTube still has network effects and probably can't be dislodged - Google cloud isn't going anywhere
- BeetleB 3mo ago
  > Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore. What do they use? Of all my tech friends, colleagues, I'm the only one who uses Kagi. Another person uses searx. Everyone else uses Google. Of my non-tech friends and colleagues, everyone uses Google.
  - worik 3mo ago
    > Of my non-tech friends and colleagues, everyone uses Google. Me, almost, too. I have some friends using duckduckgo - not many and only until Google is the default again...
    - SoftTalker 3mo ago

Imustaskforhelp 3mo ago

(IANAL) I think that the deeper thing from this lawsuit is that from my understanding, (inherently) Search engines are considered public indexes and the data (URL's,index) behind it is considered uncopyrighted and as such aren't protected by DMCA because DMCA only works for copyrighted contents and thus the dismissal of the lawsuit by the Judge. Basically, search engines are publicly scrapable, though I do wonder as from a law point of view, that it must be within the murky waters as to what a search engine means in terms of seperating its search engine code/its recomendation engine and the public data much of which are intertwined with each other. I believe that the argument that could be made is that the recommendation engine is the way it is because of all the data and its unseperable to really copyright the whole mechanism in all its glory. Speaking of which, it seems that AI models feel really similar. Does this judge lawsuit show that AI model weights aren't copyrightable as well? If a search engine is built on public indexes then so are the AI models. I was just writing similar comment on another thread but it seems to be the case, definitely worth a blog article or thinking more about perhaps this judgement by this judge itself in general as well, I just have a vibe that this judgement has pretty far reaching consequences in its impact.

torisima 3mo ago
In that case, even if using a service violates its terms of service, distilling its AI output is not necessarily illegal under the law.

dmix 3mo ago

DMCA needs to be reformed one day.

throwaway613746 3mo ago
Copyright should be abolished.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  That would probably cause some kind of massive economic shock and/or collapse at this point. But we can think about how to improve it.
  - throwaway613746 3mo ago
    [dead]
- wavemode 3mo ago
  No, but it should only last 10 years or so. Copyright in general is good as it provides economic incentive to produce new creative works. But copyright lasting or exceeding the length of people's lifetimes has done more harm than good to society. By that time, you have long since passed over from incentivizing creators, into enabling rent-seeking corporations.
krupan 3mo ago
That's not news to me, but this article was a really good reminder of how awful that law is. How have we not gotten it fixed yet??

akrymski 3mo ago

EU protects a database creator if there has been a qualitative or quantitative "substantial investment" in obtaining, verifying, or presenting the content, regardless of creative expression. In USA copyright requires a minimum degree of original creativity in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of the data. I think it's a rather grey line to say that Google search results are just facts, but eg maps are copyrightable. There's a rather large amount of effort involved in crawling and ranking the web - the PageRank itself should be copyrightable.

altcognito 3mo ago
They definitely started blowing through that line when they started serving up content answers as results.
dataflow 3mo ago
> I think it's a rather grey line to say that Google search results are just facts, but eg maps are copyrightable. I don't think a map is a good example. A picture is probably a better one. A map, by its very definition, is not a replica of any part of the original artifact. Not merely because a map is not the territory, but also because it's not even a direct, unaltered view of the thing. There is clearly some creativity required in putting together a map, since it requires you to decide what to include, what to leave out, what to exaggerate, what to distort, etc... as evidenced by maps of the same area looking vastly different. By contrast, search engine results are stitchings of various pieces of the text on the page, verbatim. How much creativity that embidies is probably akin to that within a photo.
- whaleofatw2022 3mo ago
  Where it gets tricky is that, at least in past US case law, 'maps are facts' and thus cannot be copyrighted as easily (this is part of why published maps often have intentional, hopefully subtle errors in them) [0] [0] - I believe a specific case was Nintendo vs Prima publishing, which was even involving a map of a fictitious construct.
  - 3mo ago

SoftTalker 3mo ago

> The whole thing was just “we don’t like that this is happening, so we’re suing.” Typical behavior from a big company with immense resources. They probably thought they would get a settlement or SerpAPI could not afford to fight. I assume they are pretty small, at least in comparison to Google (I've never heard of them). Google has so much money that even a "loser pays" requirement on litigation probably would not disuade them.

inigyou 3mo ago
SerpAPI is probably paid by most of the marketing industry to monitor their own position in Google results. And those guys seem to have unlimited money.

dude250711 3mo ago

Having good thoughts about Google is kind of nostalgic!

stefan_lec 3mo ago

Where’s my nanometer-sized violin? Always losing that darn thing …

cryo32 3mo ago
Mine is worn out.
probably_wrong 3mo ago
I may have a smaller one. I don't know exactly where it is, but at least I know exactly how fast it's moving.
RobotToaster 3mo ago
A tardigrade stole mine.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

1saadcodes 3mo ago

The irony is that Google's success was built on crawling and indexing the open web. I understand wanting to protect your product, but once you remove affordable APIs and then object to third parties filling that gap, you're creating demand for the very behavior you're trying to discourage

ralfd 3mo ago
I dont get the irony. Google respects if one doesnt want to get indexed by the crawler: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/block-indexing https://developers.google.com/search/docs/crawling-indexing/...
- moribunda 3mo ago
  And it has from the start, right?
inigyou 3mo ago
Pulling up the ladder behind you is a tale as old as capitalism.

luciana1u 3mo ago

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1vuio0pswjnm7 3mo ago

Missing from this blog post is that the suit was filed because OpenAI was using SerpApi to collect Google search results Alphabet is an Anthropic investor Looking forward to the Amended Complaint by August 10 https://searchengineland.com/inside-google-searchguard-467676 https://searchengineland.com/inside-google-searchguard-46767...

jeffybefffy519 3mo ago

I think this case is clearly directed at OpenAI and Anthropic, how do you think those guys get google results when the model searches for things for live data....

nexustoken 3mo ago

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SerpApi 3mo ago

SerpApi employee here. We published our perspective on the dismissal, including why we think the ruling matters for companies that rely on access to public web data: https://serpapi.com/blog/google-v-serpapi-the-court-granted-our-motion-to-dismiss/ https://serpapi.com/blog/google-v-serpapi-the-court-granted-...

crawfordmarch 2mo ago

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1vuio0pswjnm7 2mo ago

From Order dismissing Google's complaint: "Accordingly, the Court cannot reasonably infer that such licensing agreements grant Google authorization to deploy technological measures to control access to the copyrighted content at issue." "Under Iqbal's plausibility standard, Google must, but has not, alleged factual matter that raises the inference that copyright owners authorized the implementation of SearchGuard as a technological measure to control access to copyrighted content. Allegations that Google has licenses to display copyrighted content in the Knowledge Panel are not sufficient, without more, to raise that inference." Is the "Knowledge Panel" (KP) in SERPs comprised of copyrighted content If yes, do KP licensing agreements grant Google authorization to deploy technological measures to control access to the copyrighted content https://www.stackmatix.com/blog/how-to-get-google-knowledge-panel https://www.stackmatix.com/blog/how-to-get-google-knowledge-...