Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

techdirt.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 164 posts

Re: Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

#21

Post by aqfamnzc »

BeetleB wrote: post #18
echelon wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has no moat anymore. - Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore. - Coding models make doing extreme depth of work possible. - Hoards of unemployed engineers now have access to 10x coding utilities and are looking for things to do. They will start clawing away at Google products. - Just the other day, someone cloned Google Gsuite and it looked awesome - Drive and Search w…

> Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore. What do they use? Of all my tech friends, colleagues, I'm the only one who uses Kagi. Another person uses searx. Everyone else uses Google. Of my non-tech friends and colleagues, everyone uses Google.

Let me tell you about this new little-known technology that's been gaining traction in the last few years...

Re: Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

#22

Post by rebasedoctopus »

echelon wrote: post #17
beloch wrote: post #16

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.

Google has no moat anymore. - Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore. - Coding models make doing extreme depth of work possible. - Hoards of unemployed engineers now have access to 10x coding utilities and are looking for things to do. They will start clawing away at Google products. - Just the other day, someone cloned Google Gsuite and it looked awesome - Drive and Search w…

are your peers me, myself, and I? that is a wild claim. I'll start asking around but I don't think I could find one person that says they don't use google search anymore

Re: Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

#23

Post by bstsb »

echelon wrote: post #17
beloch wrote: post #16

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.

Google has no moat anymore. - Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore. - Coding models make doing extreme depth of work possible. - Hoards of unemployed engineers now have access to 10x coding utilities and are looking for things to do. They will start clawing away at Google products. - Just the other day, someone cloned Google Gsuite and it looked awesome - Drive and Search w…

> Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore.

bear in mind we're on Hacker News. Google's market share is still above 90% - in almost any other market this would be a ridiculous monopoly.

Re: Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

#24

Post by horsawlarway »

throwaway87543 wrote: post #11
guardiangod wrote: post #3

“You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen, and I think it quite ungentlemanly."

Google crawling respects robots.txt and doesn't break capcha. It is easy to tell Google to piss off. SerpAPI fully relies on end-user proxies distributed like malware (in LG tv apps for instance), it has no other way it could function because it exclusively ingests data from sources that tell it to stop. If you wanted to scrape a bot friendly site, you wouldn't need SerpApi

I'm vaguely sympathetic to this argument.

But only vaguely. Google uses its monopoly position in advertising to basically ensure that you allow them to scrape your site (or if not you personally, the majority of revenue driving sites). They have the benefit of being allowed by default.

They also then scrape again at the user level for users operating chrome.

They also conveniently ignore global blocks for their adsbots (you have to specifically name them to block them).

If you're not Google, you likely don't have this luxury.

My preference would be that governments force search indexes to be public. The exact mechanisms for this can be debated.

Re: Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

#25

Post by Terr_ »

jonatron wrote: post #6

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

It's interesting to imagine how the world would be different, if internet advertising giants were partially liable for scams/malware that they facilitate.

Re: Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

#27

Post by Imustaskforhelp »

(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.

Re: Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

#28

Post by BeetleB »

aqfamnzc wrote: post #21
BeetleB wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore. What do they use? Of all my tech friends, colleagues, I'm the only one who uses Kagi. Another person uses searx. Everyone else uses Google. Of my non-tech friends and colleagues, everyone uses Google.

Let me tell you about this new little-known technology that's been gaining traction in the last few years...

Really bad idea for a lot of search use cases.

Re: Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

#29

Post by janalsncm »

aqfamnzc wrote: post #21
BeetleB wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Google search is on the way out. I don't know any of my peers who use it anymore. What do they use? Of all my tech friends, colleagues, I'm the only one who uses Kagi. Another person uses searx. Everyone else uses Google. Of my non-tech friends and colleagues, everyone uses Google.

Let me tell you about this new little-known technology that's been gaining traction in the last few years...

Sure, go ahead and ask the LLM who won the 2026 World Cup. Or nearby BBQ places open now.

Even assuming no hallucinations, an LLM can replace some use cases for search but not all.

Post reply on HN