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

Post by sidibe » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 3:38 PM UTC

giarc wrote: post #159

sidibe wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Recently one of the lyrics sites had a similar complaint that might be the same thing happening in this case (and maybe it was the same issue for Bing's case too). If you specify that you don't want Google to take snippets, but a third party ignores the robots.txt or meta tags and has a permissive one of its own Google can just scrape it from there. A missing detail here is what did the textbox for the fake celebriti…

I believe it was Genius that was using rare unicode characters in the lyrics that don't really show up when viewing the page. They were able to see that Google had those same characters in their lyric results and therefore Google was just scraping Genius.

Post by mthoms » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 3:55 PM UTC

scoopertrooper wrote: post #157

mthoms wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article says they employed a number of researchers to come up with the numbers. I don't think property records (or any other publicly available information) would be enough to come up with an accurate figure in an automated fashion. So, there's some educated guesses (aka "informed estimations") going on and therefore a form of "creativity" (IMHO).

I agree if the testimony is taken at face value, it makes a pretty reasonable case. However, there's nothing to say that the values he arrived at were accurate (not that it'd necessarily be material to the case) or that his 'researchers' were not just some content farm to write up articles around those numbers in order to enhance SEO. These are the kind of things that'd be deliberated upon in a court case.

Post by renlo » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 4:06 PM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #85

mfer wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking someone else's copy written content and presenting it as your own can be seen as content theft. Imagine if a book author did that to a chapter of a book. When the one doing it can essential present the case that they should be allowed to do it or they will destroy your business then it's an abuse of power. When they are in a position to actually do it because they have so much of the power in the space it can…

> Taking someone else's copy written content […] (You should read up a bit on this; it’s obvious you have not since you call it “copy written” when the term is “copyright” and a work can therefore be “copyrighted”. The term is about who has the right to copy a given work, and has nothing to do with “writing”.) Copying text someone else has written is indeed copyright infringement (commonly, but technically inaccurate…

Post by renlo » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 4:12 PM UTC

asah wrote: post #68

Isn't this a question if just scraping published data? How is this materially different from LinkedIn v hIQ ?

Post by scoopertrooper » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 4:17 PM UTC

mthoms wrote: post #183

scoopertrooper wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree if the testimony is taken at face value, it makes a pretty reasonable case. However, there's nothing to say that the values he arrived at were accurate (not that it'd necessarily be material to the case) or that his 'researchers' were not just some content farm to write up articles around those numbers in order to enhance SEO. These are the kind of things that'd be deliberated upon in a court case.

I think we agree. If the numbers required actual research they should be copyright-able.