alt Hacker NewsJudge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped
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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.
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
DMCA needs to be reformed one day.
I am somewhat confused - does this mean we can all now legally scrape Google search results?
Hypocrisy-rich.
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.
If only GPT wouldn't refuse my requests to write a crawler for $site. :(
(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.
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?
“You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen, and I think it quite ungentlemanly."
Source:
Google vs. SerpApi: The Court Granted Our Motion to Dismiss
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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.