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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]

#101

Post by bryanrasmussen »

philprx wrote: post #39
errantmind wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Now it's clearly IPR theft, present it how you like, but theft is theft. I don't quite see the legal basis for it being theft. Can you explain?

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…

actually this is interesting right here, because if Google takes CNW's fake celebrity, then that is definite copyright infringement - the fake celebrity was created by CNW and as such is not a fact so Google can't argue that it's not copyrighted because facts are not copyrighted.

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

#102

Post by an_opabinia »

wombatmobile wrote: post #97
Jefff8 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Databases have protection under EU law. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/protection-dat... The EU is also interested in Google, and this looks like a slam-dunk case on the face of it.

Right on, Jeff8. And when Teddyh says "simple numbers like a dollar amount can’t be copyrighted" he's ignoring the fact that google isn't just copying dollar amounts. Google's copying a data set which establishes a dollar amount as a net worth of a particular person. That's a database. The only difficulty for CNW will be coming up with the money, time, and emotional energy to achieve a result in court over as many ye…

Nobody forces you to (checks notes) create celebrity net worth databases.

I just feel like we live in a time with more information than ever, the problem clearly being inaccurate information or propaganda. The problem isn’t insufficient marginal knowledge. Obviously we live in this high knowledge world because of, not despite, Google, so it’s hard to see if you’d really be on the right side of justice if you’re against “big knowledge”

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

#103

Post by skinkestek »

The scariest thing for Google might be that generally people aren't cheering for them anymore, and many are following them closely to catch them as soon as possible.

Compare that to 10 years ago when I and others would cut them 9 yards of slack.

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

#105

Post by switch11 »

manish_gill wrote: post #48

I have Zero respect for the Google engineers and PMs who worked on this project, scraping content without attributing to the original source, and subsequent change in the search ranking of the original source. A very bad taste in the mouth indeed.

agreed 100%

We went through something very similar

where Google 'disappeared' an entire category of apps from the App Store because one of our competitor/friend companies in the same area as us was growing very fast

That guy started talking about adding thousands of new users a day. Within 2 weeks Google had removed ALL (every single one) apps in that category

Also this is a search vertical. So it's the very definition of anti trust

*

anyways, it's good that people are talking about this

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

#106

Post by remus »

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.

It would depend on how the websites google are collecting data from operate. For example, somewhere like wikipedia isn't harmed through google's re-use of the facts they collate.

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

#107

Post by switch11 »

huffmsa wrote: post #40
lalaland1125 wrote: post #6

I think Google is in the right here. Facts are not protected by copyright and they shouldn't be. Imagine being able to copyright the density of steel or the list of historical US presidents. It would be a disaster.

Let's reframe it. > My company "Expected Home Prices" employs a dozen researchers and analysts who generate predictions of the worth of particular properties. > Google Takes our predictions wholesale, and displays them without attribution or payment as their own data. See the problem here?

this is an excellent example

Wonder what percentage of the people who are claiming 'Google is not in the wrong here' actually read the article/deposition

he talks about a lot of stuff

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

#108

Post by ubercow13 »

remus wrote: post #106
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.

It would depend on how the websites google are collecting data from operate. For example, somewhere like wikipedia isn't harmed through google's re-use of the facts they collate.

They are if they have less visitors to see their donation requests, stop making enough money and shut down.

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

#109

Post by mcintyre1994 »

> And what about those conjured celebrities I added as a precaution? All five were all scraped right into Google’s search result pages. It provided undeniable proof that after being turned down, Google simply went ahead and stole the entire database of content CNW took eight years and over a million dollars to build.

I remember a few years ago Google had a big blog post about how they’d injected some fake search results to catch Bing scraping like this. It certainly seemed like they thought it was a bad thing back then.

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

#110

Post by scoopertrooper »

wombatmobile wrote: post #97
Jefff8 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Databases have protection under EU law. https://ec.europa.eu/digital-single-market/en/protection-dat... The EU is also interested in Google, and this looks like a slam-dunk case on the face of it.

Right on, Jeff8. And when Teddyh says "simple numbers like a dollar amount can’t be copyrighted" he's ignoring the fact that google isn't just copying dollar amounts. Google's copying a data set which establishes a dollar amount as a net worth of a particular person. That's a database. The only difficulty for CNW will be coming up with the money, time, and emotional energy to achieve a result in court over as many ye…

The mere fact that he compiled the database isn't sufficient to qualify for copyright protection. He'll have to show that he used a sufficient level of creativity to arrive at the numbers he displayed.

Based on his testimony, I suspect he'd have a reasonable case to argue, but he'd have to show that his researchers carefully weighed different sources and made other judgements for each individual celebrity rather than just running some script over public property records.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_in_lists#C...

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