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

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

#31
post #17
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’s moat is that websites aren’t blocking their crawler.

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

#32
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…

> - I'm itching at the chance to build my own phone operating system, and there must be thousands of others who want to do the same. Maybe look into contributing to existing alternatives like PostmarketOS. https://postmarketos.org/

Please don't send vibecoders to established open source projects . Your literally sabotaging them if you succeed.

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

#33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fwiw, I've done those kinds of requests before and it did so successfully.

It did use Google to provide me with the answers though, sooo...

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

#34
post #25
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.

I recall a articale I read "somewhere" that reported the Facebook makes big profit (Billions) from scams. So they have no ( or no strong motive) motive to shut such scams down

An example is courtcase against Meta for using a Australians mining billionares likeness to promote a crypo investment scam.

https://www.afr.com/technology/dad-it-s-a-fraud-call-that-sp...

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

#35
post #17
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…

> 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.

No way this is threat to google. For the same reason why the same hordes of engineers did not managed to compete with large companies up to now. And for the same reason they were not producing all that many novel small apps last 10 years.

This is winner takes all economy. Tokens or no tokes, this is not the econony of small competing companies. This is the world of big ones.

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

#36

What about them taking content for their AI summaries? Have they created a system that gets content owners and creators paid in this regard yet?

These are still open: https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/en/ip_25_...

https://www.epceurope.eu/post/european-publishers-council-fi...

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

#38
post #35
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…

> 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. No way this is threat to google. For the same reason why the same hordes of engineers did not managed to compete with large companies up to now. And for the same reason they were not producing all that many novel small apps last 10 years. This is winner takes all…

If only there were laws about antitrust. Oh well.

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

#39

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.

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.

Last time I looked into this (about a month ago), there's a lot of restrictions on the use of Gemini's search grounding results. There's not even an easy or approved way to de-mangle their returned URL's to get to the real URL of the search results. Has that changed recently?

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

#40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The LLMs I've tried don't do well with very new stuff. Like Zig for example, they tell me answers that were good for Zig 0.12 but we on 0.16 now. So I've got to feed them the latest docs, then do the AI dance.
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