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

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

#191

Post by sroussey » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 4:26 PM UTC

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #166

WalterGR wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have evidence - it’s in the link. I also have proof, but I’m not comfortable with publishing my communication with the Google employee right now. I have no idea why the penalty is in place. What I describe is “incredibly circumstantial.” You say that my site poses no threat. Is that because it hasn’t seen traffic growth or become popular? The site is no threat exactly because the penalty is in place and has been fo…

Just to save everyone the effort, the closest thing to evidence amid that blog post's many wild allegations is that the pandas update changes around citations hurt the site's google flow. This isn't surprising. That hit a lot of low quality websites that were essentially arbitraging google to aggregate content duplicated elsewhere on the web. I worked for a similar business with considerably more traffic. We didn't i…

Breaking the rules gets you dinged until you fix things. Repeatedly breaking rules results in more permanent dings. Both with search and with Adsense.

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

#192

Post by alex_young » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 4:36 PM UTC

I searched for a couple of celebrities, and in one case celebritynetworth.com is the top result, in the other it is the third result.

Both queries show info boxes with the estimated net worth, both cite other pages (no link to celebritynetworth.com), and one showed another number than celebritynetworth.com.

celebritynetworth.com has a robots.txt. This file has no restriction on Google or any other bot.

Each celebrity page seems to have the following meta tag:

Given the above, it seems like Google is correctly listing celebritynetworth.com high in it's rankings, and using other resources for the info box, which is what celebritynetworth.com is asking them to do.

While it's hard to speculate about what happened in the past, it looks like Google is doing the correct thing now, and that this information isn't actually so novel in general.

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

#193

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 4:52 PM UTC

badwolf wrote: post #150

WalterGR wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true. Due to the penalty, the site gets less and less traffic every year. Enabling SSL/TLS might help a bit, but I have to face facts: the site is dead.

Not to belittle your experience, but it seems this may be a bit of a negative feedback loop. Haven't updated the homepage because "what's the point I'm already punished" etc...

[deleted]

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

#194

Post by sct202 » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 4:59 PM UTC

ender7 wrote: post #186

DanBC wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may want to read these posts: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9977372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5419890

I have to say, after reading those posts, Matt is looking more trustworthy than the OP. Especially considering the definitely-not-a-sock-puppet post by jimboykin [1], an account that was created immediately after this thread and has but a single post on HN. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5476100

I mean part of this issue is that there is no feedback to the website owner, which is shown by the guy only getting a response here on HN.

Like isn't it kind of insane that the top Google search engineer provided customer service to OP, but he couldn't get a response thru a normal channel.

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

#195

Post by tripletao » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:05 PM UTC

mthoms wrote: post #182

lalaland1125 wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 or…

>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 Wait, what? You asserted the speed of light could only be estimated . Not me. A "physical constant" is, by definition, a fact and not copyrightable. You're now arguing the opposite point you were arguing two comments ago ("all facts are well-researched estimates"). Wha…

Your distinction between "measure" and "estimate" seems meaningless to me, and probably to most scientists and engineers. All physical measurements have uncertainty, and many people are engaged as we speak in creative (in the colloquial sense of the word) work seeking to reduce that uncertainty. We tend to say "measurement" when the uncertainty is negligibly small for whatever purpose is at hand, and "estimate" when it's not; but that distinction is as much in how the number will be used as in the number itself.

As to specific examples, the speed of light and charge on an electron are tricky because they're both exact by definition in SI today; but considerable creativity was required to get those definitions. The mass of the Earth is uncertain in kg today, and creative work is ongoing to decrease that uncertainty. So does that make a new estimate of the mass of the Earth copyrightable? Perhaps just the last, previously-unknown digits would be copyrightable?

I'm not aware of case law on anything too closely resembling physical constants; but I'm near-certain the answer if litigated would be no, and I'd guess the argument would be something like "you're uncovering some preexisting truth, not creating something new (no matter how 'creative' your approach to the uncovering)". Returning to the original question, the CNW guy presumably got competent legal advice and concluded the copyright angle wasn't worth pursuing, and instead focused on the antitrust angle in his testimony.

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

#196

Post by perseusmandate » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:24 PM UTC

techntoke wrote: post #129

tester34 wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Plus there are a lot of other major open source projects that come out of Google. Way more than Microsoft, Apple and Amazon. Is it even true? MS does a lot of open source

Yes if you compare the code base size and the core components. Microsoft still hasn't open sourced it's main consumer operating system and neither has Apple.

Not a valid comparison since those are core products of both companies. Google hasn't and never will open source Search.

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

#197

Post by techntoke » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:30 PM UTC

perseusmandate wrote: post #196

techntoke wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes if you compare the code base size and the core components. Microsoft still hasn't open sourced it's main consumer operating system and neither has Apple.

Not a valid comparison since those are core products of both companies. Google hasn't and never will open source Search.

Android is one of Google's core products, as well as web (including Chromium).

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

#198

Post by mfer » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:38 PM UTC

renlo wrote: post #185

teddyh wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

NAL and the only information I have is from a 2 credit intellectual property class I took in college, but facts (like dollar amounts) are not copyrightable, but curated collections of facts (like an almanac) are copyrightable. It seems this would fall under the latter category. Also from the LinkedIn - hiQ Labs lawsuit, it seems that unfair business practices are factored in. Google is implementing unfair business pr…

IANAL either. But, there is a difference between taking a straight dollar amount (a fact) and description written that includes the fact.

If all Google did was display the dollar estimate that would be one thing. They go beyond that to include textual content pulled directly from sites.

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

#199

Post by not2b » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:44 PM UTC

Many commenters are interpreting this as strictly a matter of copyright violation, and are asking the question of whether facts can be copyrighted. But that's too narrow a way of looking at this; there's also antitrust law. If Google scrapes everything interesting off of other sites and presents it as their own, even if it finds a way to do this that does not violate copyright, it's anti-competitive behavior that may violate antitrust law.

(I'm not addressing the European database protection rules which may also apply).

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

#200

Post by mthoms » Mon, Aug 10, 2020, 5:46 PM UTC

tripletao wrote: post #195

mthoms wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 Wait, what? You asserted the speed of light could only be estimated . Not me. A "physical constant" is, by definition, a fact and not copyrightable. You're now arguing the opposite point you were arguing two comments ago ("all facts are well-researched estimates"). Wha…

Your distinction between "measure" and "estimate" seems meaningless to me, and probably to most scientists and engineers. All physical measurements have uncertainty, and many people are engaged as we speak in creative (in the colloquial sense of the word) work seeking to reduce that uncertainty. We tend to say "measurement" when the uncertainty is negligibly small for whatever purpose is at hand, and "estimate" when…

>So does that make a new estimate of the mass of the Earth copyrightable?

Likely not on its own (due to fair use). But in a "collection" of estimates for the mass of all known celestial bodies then yes, it absolutely would be copyrightable. The same way a collection of stock price targets produced by a research company are copyrightable.

I agree with the rest of your comment in general but it's relevance to the discussion is questionable. In court, the speed of light would certainly be "a fact" unless it was expressed to a precision beyond the margin of error, and that margin of error was relevant to the copyright claim. That's getting way off track from the original point since we'd be talking about a singular number instead of a collection of numbers.

Back to the original discussion: A collection of facts is not copyright-able. The poster said the collection of wealth estimates was factual and therefore not copyright-able. That's provably false since another, equally skilled researcher would come up with different numbers and they can't both be factual. Right?

>the CNW guy presumably got competent legal advice and concluded the copyright angle wasn't worth pursuing

You're trying to imply that this means he had no legal basis for his claim. I find that very disingenuous. Besides, there's no need to speculate on why he didn't pursue legal action, the reasons are clearly outlined in the write up.

Edit: I see now why the "speed of light" example is not a good one since the meter is derived from the speed of light. Perhaps pi is the best example of a simple, agreed upon, physical constant or "fact" for the purpose of this debate.