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Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

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Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#171

Post by mthoms »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #155
philprx wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL: 1. Google doesn't show in-line'd data box with Net worth 2. Google asks site (CNW) for access, is denied. 3. Google then shows site's data in data box (with CNW site proof of theft with canary tokens being the fake celebrity's net worth) that are now presented as Google's data (no source or fake source), without license from original site. If that isn't theft of data, what is it? From the PDFs, there is no lic…

This isn't theft of data or copyright infringement because you can't copyright facts in the US.

These aren't facts though. They are researched estimates. Different researchers will come up with different numbers.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#172

Post by klyrs »

tyingq wrote: post #104

Doesn't this behavior eventually hurt Google? If there's no incentive for third parties to collate, verify, and organize facts...eventually there isn't anyone to scrape. And the facts go stale.

Once it's too stale, they'll just kill the product. If somebody fills the niche in the future, they can just buy them or scrape them.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#173

Post by lalaland1125 »

mthoms wrote: post #171
lalaland1125 wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't theft of data or copyright infringement because you can't copyright facts in the US.

These aren't facts though. They are researched estimates. Different researchers will come up with different numbers.

All facts are well researched estimates. Our number for the speed of light didn't come out of the ether: someone came up with a very sophisticated experiment to get a highly accurate estimate and different experiments get different estimates. Do you think the speed of light should be copyrightable?

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#174

Post by WalterGR »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #167
WalterGR wrote: post #113

Google is incredibly shady. There’s been a manual penalty in place against my website The Online Slang Dictionary ( http://onlineslangdictionary.com ) for the better part of a decade. I know this because the data suggested it - and then a Google employee confirmed it. It would be easy to explain it away because Aaron Peckham, owner of Urban Dictionary, worked at Google when Matt Cutts was head of the Web Spam team, a…

You appear to have roughly the same ranking in both Bing and Google for two words that I tried ("bro", "womp womp"). Do you believe there is also a conspiracy against your website at Microsoft?

Nope.

It’s been 9 years since the penalties started. One could say that the site had taken something of a popularity hit since then.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#175

Post by bufferoverflow »

teddyh wrote: post #41

The primary case here made against Google might be questionable behavior from Google, but might not be illegal, since simple numbers like a dollar amount can’t be copyrighted, and AFAIK there is no other legal impediment to Google doing what they did (IANAL). What looks far more inculpatory to me is this, on the last page: […] Because it controls essentially the entire internet, Google has endless levers at its dispo…

It's not just the numbers though. It's a database of names with numbers, all clearly stolen.

I'm pretty sure it's covered by copyright infringement laws.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#176

Post by WalterGR »

cynicalkane wrote: post #168
WalterGR wrote: post #113

Google is incredibly shady. There’s been a manual penalty in place against my website The Online Slang Dictionary ( http://onlineslangdictionary.com ) for the better part of a decade. I know this because the data suggested it - and then a Google employee confirmed it. It would be easy to explain it away because Aaron Peckham, owner of Urban Dictionary, worked at Google when Matt Cutts was head of the Web Spam team, a…

> I do know that when I confronted Cutts about the penalty here on HN he lied about it - which does lead one to wonder about his motive The preamble to this post hints of paranoia, but this is where we know for sure. There's no reason to believe Cutts would have any personal knowledge or involvement or motivation, except that he knew another person who might have had some weak interest in maybe doing something. Of co…

There's no reason to believe Cutts would have any personal knowledge

Cutts was the head of the Web Spam team at the time. That team is responsible for penalties.

He and I had an exchange here years ago. The text of his comment implies that he looked up penalties, so he had knowledge: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5426209

This seems like a conduct violation on here or any reasonable discussion site.

If that’s the case, I’m happy to discuss it with dang or another admin.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#177

Post by mthoms »

lalaland1125 wrote: post #173
mthoms wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These aren't facts though. They are researched estimates. Different researchers will come up with different numbers.

All facts are well researched estimates. Our number for the speed of light didn't come out of the ether: someone came up with a very sophisticated experiment to get a highly accurate estimate and different experiments get different estimates. Do you think the speed of light should be copyrightable?

The speed of light is absolutely not an estimate. It's a mathematically provable fact.

Facts (in this context) are numbers that are not reasonably disputable. The value of pi, the speed of light and my current phone number are all facts.

What I happen to think the net worth of someone else is, is certainly not a fact. You might think it's something else. It would be difficult to prove either one of us right.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#178

Post by lalaland1125 »

mthoms wrote: post #177
lalaland1125 wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All facts are well researched estimates. Our number for the speed of light didn't come out of the ether: someone came up with a very sophisticated experiment to get a highly accurate estimate and different experiments get different estimates. Do you think the speed of light should be copyrightable?

The speed of light is absolutely not an estimate. It's a mathematically provable fact. Facts (in this context) are numbers that are not reasonably disputable. The value of pi, the speed of light and my current phone number are all facts. What I happen to think the net worth of someone else is, is certainly not a fact. You might think it's something else. It would be difficult to prove either one of us right.

If you don't believe that the speed of light is a physically measured quantity, then replace that question with whatever physical constant you prefer (charge of an electron, gravitational constant, current mass of the earth, etc, etc). Do you think those numbers should be copyrightable? The charge of the electron is particularly interesting as there was actually a lot of debate over that number because some of the original experiments were flawed.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#179

Post by specialist »

rozab wrote: post #132
WalterGR wrote: post #113

Google is incredibly shady. There’s been a manual penalty in place against my website The Online Slang Dictionary ( http://onlineslangdictionary.com ) for the better part of a decade. I know this because the data suggested it - and then a Google employee confirmed it. It would be easy to explain it away because Aaron Peckham, owner of Urban Dictionary, worked at Google when Matt Cutts was head of the Web Spam team, a…

Do you have any evidence at all for these extraordinary claims? Why would Urban Dictionary go to such lengths to suppress a competitor which posed no threat[0]? I also notice that the homepage hasn't been updated at all for at least 8 years[1]. I suspect this may have had something to do with its decline. [0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2004-01-10%202... [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20120107121…

Edit: Is there any way to prove that Google isn't/hasn't unfairly penalized this site?

I'm more willing to suspend Hitchens Razor when a well known defendant has such a long history of doing much worse.

Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]

#180

Post by toyg »

hluska wrote: post #119
teddyh wrote: post #41

The primary case here made against Google might be questionable behavior from Google, but might not be illegal, since simple numbers like a dollar amount can’t be copyrighted, and AFAIK there is no other legal impediment to Google doing what they did (IANAL). What looks far more inculpatory to me is this, on the last page: […] Because it controls essentially the entire internet, Google has endless levers at its dispo…

> This is far more damning of Google abusing its monopoly, not only on search, but also on the Android platform. No, it’s really not. I just visited celebritynetworth.com. One article took 462 http requests, loaded 9mb of content and though DOM content loaded in 434ms, it took 1 minute to finish loading everything. The sheer amount of adware on this site is staggering. Let’s put down the pitchforks and put on our cri…

Any right or principle worth defending will always apply to you as well as to people you don't like.
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