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- Hacker News
- Hypocrisy-rich.by xbar
- 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-46767...
- DMCA needs to be reformed one day.by dmix
- Copyright should be abolished.
- 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??by krupan
- 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-...
- I am somewhat confused - does this mean we can all now legally scrape Google search results?by thisislife2
- Always has been
- Legally and ‘they won’t do everything they can to stop you’ are not the same thing of course.by lazide
- (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.
- In that case, even if using a service violates its terms of service, distilling its AI output is not necessarily illegal under the law.by torisima
- 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-...by SerpApi
- 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 discourageby 1saadcodes
- Pulling up the ladder behind you is a tale as old as capitalism.by inigyou
- 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/...
by ralfd - It's quite important that SERPs are scrapeable, because they keep advertising scams like ETA/ESTA sites: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957by jonatron
- > Applying for an Esta travel permit to visit the US should cost no more than $14
Ah, good old times.
by account42 - Same with land registry UK, it takes me several tries even though I know I should be looking for the .gov version. Last time I only realised I got the ad version because it asked me to pay for something that's free on the gov version.by exe34
- It's interesting to imagine how the world would be different, if internet advertising giants were partially liable for scams/malware that they facilitate.by Terr_
- 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.
by akrymski - It's been over 20 years since the PageRank paper was released. We're past that point and they stopped using PageRank 15 years ago.by ipaddr
- They definitely started blowing through that line when they started serving up content answers as results.by altcognito
- > 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.
by dataflow - > 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.
by SoftTalker - 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.by inigyou
- 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.by binarymax
- I stopped using Google once it started requiring JS for search. That was the day the open web truly died.by userbinator
- 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.
- I wonder how this changes things (EU forces to share search data):
https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/eu-forces-google-sh...
by nicce