An odd witness for the very true issues people have with Google Search. Google is crediting all websites it uses information from. It might be sad for such a site but I wonder how the creator thought that this is sustainable. Sites with biographical data for famous people already existed and for them adding net worth information is easy. So if not Google had kill them, they might have being killed by IMDb oder Wikipedia.
Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]
51–60 of 271 posts
Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
You keep calling it “theft”. It is obviously not literally theft, since no physical object has been taken. The only thing you could possibly mean is “copyright infringement” (which is commonly called theft in imprecise and inflammatory language), but copyright does not apply to a simple fact like a dollar amount, no matter how much research lies behind it. You might be of the opinion that it should , but that is a di…
Ok, sorry sir ;-) Copyright infringement. What's the difference really here?
IANAL means this precisely (and on a side note, I'm here for open exchange and debate, not for claiming to be right ;-)
Interestingly, depending on jurisdictions, there are places on the globe (EU, FR) where I think the terminology is theft not copyright infringement ("theft of database"), even if it does not apply to this US National dispute. Now let's see how this goes with the US gov.
Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]
#53It looks more like an ethical argument than a legal one. I don't understand how this data would be protected under US law. Can someone explain if you think otherwise? Is the issue that the data was scraped? Or is the issue Google appropriated the scraped data for use in their search results? From my perspective it just looks like a bad business model: spend a lot of time and effort estimating net worth, and then publ…
This has been settled case law for decades thanks to sports almanacs. Facts (like someones net worth) cannot be copyrighted. However a compilation of facts can be. If CNW had published a book, Google purchased it off of Amazon, and paid an intern to retype it in to fact boxes - that is clear copyright violation. The fact that Google bought the data from a third party data broker who scraped CNW does not absolve them…
> Facts (like someones net worth) cannot be copyrighted. However a compilation of facts can be.
It’s my understanding that this ceased to be true in the USA in 1991 and that a minimal degree of creativity is required [0]. Other countries have started following suit more recently.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc.,_v._R....
Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]
#54I 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.
While an individual fact can't be copyrighted, a collection of them can be in certain circumstances when the compiler has put in effort to create a database of them. https://copyright.uslegal.com/enumerated-categories-of-copyr...
> when the compiler has put in effort
Not effort. That’s the Sweat of the Brow doctrine [0] which is no longer law. The requirement is creativity.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow#United_State...
Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]
#55The primary case here made against Google might be questionable behavior from Google, but might not be illegal, since simple numbers like a dollar amount can’t be copyrighted, and AFAIK there is no other legal impediment to Google doing what they did (IANAL). What looks far more inculpatory to me is this, on the last page: […] Because it controls essentially the entire internet, Google has endless levers at its dispo…
Well we can hope to surface avenues of monopolistic behavior that allow a company to abuse their position within the confines of the law through committees like this. Just because it follows the letter of the law doesn't mean it's not malicious or damaging.
Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]
#56The primary case here made against Google might be questionable behavior from Google, but might not be illegal, since simple numbers like a dollar amount can’t be copyrighted, and AFAIK there is no other legal impediment to Google doing what they did (IANAL). What looks far more inculpatory to me is this, on the last page: […] Because it controls essentially the entire internet, Google has endless levers at its dispo…
> 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.
A number might not be copyrightable, but what about a news article? What would happen if all the world’s new sites just denied the Google crawler using robots.txt? What if they also returned 404s if accessed from an IP address known to be owned by Google?
Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the wikipedia page cites https://www.forbes.com/profile/bill-gates/?list=billionaires... As the source for Bill Gates' net worth. Why can a free, community edited website successfully attribute it's sources but a trillion dollar company cannot?
Can you or anyone show me an example? I searched over ten celebrities and only found CNW as either 2nd or 3rd result. All snippets were giving full details to the sites.
CNW's statement was about 2012 to the present. The damage is done.
I distinctly remember even recently that Google wouldn't provide attribution in the snippet.
Though now, it sure seems like the #1 results for most of my "{celebrity} net worth" queries are AMP (AKA Google approved™) pages.
Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]
#58And yet I constantly get CAPTCHA's just from blocking tracking cookies. The biggest scraper of them all goes to incredible lengths to prevent scraping. How ironic. I hope the US govt demolishes these monopolies. It's not just in web either, the closest historical precedent I can think of is the Robber Barons of the 30's
There’s a thing called a robot.txt.
Yes, and google has been observed several times to ignore the robots.txt file
Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ethical is a bit of a wide term but I’m sure it’s easy to construct situations that are problematic. E.g. an abusive ex partner can check whether you’re likely to have switched job, even from the most basic info. If tax paid is revealed then you can work out what government benefits a person might be on, including those relating to health and disability. Isn’t the implementation in Norway such that the press have spe…
Everyone have access but you have to log in with your ID and the ones you check can see that you checked them. You can check 500 people each month. Your scenario seems pretty far fetched to me since this information will be published in October for the previous year. It contains the income and tax for the whole year only. It would be pretty difficult to know the information you suggest from the limited, delayed recor…
Interesting. Hadn't heard about this before.
Curious about how it is used by the public. And can businesses login and check too?
Re: Statement on Google’s conduct by founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com (2019) [pdf]
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
Everyone have access but you have to log in with your ID and the ones you check can see that you checked them. You can check 500 people each month. Your scenario seems pretty far fetched to me since this information will be published in October for the previous year. It contains the income and tax for the whole year only. It would be pretty difficult to know the information you suggest from the limited, delayed recor…
Interesting. Hadn't heard about this before. Curious about how it is used by the public. And can businesses login and check too?
Arbitrary businesses cannot access it no. However the press can gain special access for a small fee. This means that when the lists are published there are always a lot of news articles about how much various public people earn. There are limitations on how they can use it though, and they cannot publish the whole lists.