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Comment by dahart | Hacker News Reader

> Featured Snippets usually have a note that says “About this result,” while Knowledge Graph answers do not.

This seems like the potentially most interesting part to me. Excerpting data & web sites to build a service without citing the source or giving credit seems like it could be a copyright violation.

The snippets case at least cites the source, and has a link to get you there, so even if it is damaging to a business it's probably legal.

While copyright does have exceptions carved out for copying small snippets of a work, e.g., for educational purposes, there's no clear line for copying all of a work in thousands of tiny slices that are published separately. Seems like an area where copyright law is due for a change as a result of all things digital.

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In the case of the celebrity net worth site, though, it seems pretty clear that he'd have a very thin case when it came to copyright. Just because it took them a lot of effort to come up with the numbers doesn't make the end result copyrightable - it is an estimation of a fact, and there is no copyright possibility there. Even if they took the whole thing, there is nothing non-obvious about a list of celebs and their estimated net worth. To me, that seems to have been the biggest problem in their particular business: they invested a lot of money into building something that it would be very hard to protect someone from just taking it once it is done.

If your analysis is based on judgement calls and proprietary algorithms then the end result is copyrighted even if the end result is just a spreadsheet.

Have there been any court cases where that was clearly decided?

I don't think that's true in the US – data/information isn't copyrightable, only original creative/intellectual works. A collection of data is still no original work. "Analysis based on algorithms" doesn't sound copyrightable either – only works by humans are covered.

The EU, on the other hand, has a special copyright for databases.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sui_generis_database_right#Uni...

> Just because it took them a lot of effort to come up with the numbers doesn't make the end result copyrightable

You're bringing up a valid point - facts aren't copyrightable. And while I was talking about the bigger picture, I'd have to agree that this argument may be harder for the celebrity net worth site than others.

But

Compilations of facts are copyrightable, and a large amount of effort spent compiling the numbers does in fact strengthen their case. It's called the "sweat of the brow doctrine", and copyright cases have been decided in favor of people primarily due to their efforts.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow

I speculate this doctrine does apply to sleuthing celebrity net worth from a variety of sources. But nobody knowns until it goes to court, and it depends on the quality of the lawyers as well as the nitty gritty details about how celebrity net worth gather their data.

Either way, the bigger picture is that regardless of whether the celeb site lives, there may a problem with the way Google is doing business.

From the Wikipedia article that you linked:

>The United States rejected this doctrine in the 1991 United States Supreme Court case Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service;[4] until then it had been upheld in a number of US copyright cases

(which is what I remembered from my IP law class ;-) )

Yes, that's correct, the Feist case was the first one rejected on those grounds, and found that "A mechanical, non-selective collection of facts (e.g., alphabetized phone numbers) cannot be protected by copyright." (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_United_...)

But sweat of the brow doctrine still applies to collections of facts when some creative work has been done, and does strengthen a case when there has been more sweat.

The case of the celebrity net worth site is one that is not a mechanical reproduction of facts. They are not a phone book, they are doing research and estimating net worth using implications. Their work is not single-sourced, but based on what they say is a wide variety of sources, some of which may not be publicly available. Who knows, some of it might be unsubstantiated rumor, or even "creative guessing". Just on the face of it, there is arguably enough creative work in what they're doing to satisfy a copyright claim. I doubt they're interested, and I don't think it'd be easy. I don't speak for them, I'm not a lawyer, and I don't recommend it. But to my eyes, it's not out of the realm of possibility.

Completely agree - would be interesting to see it judged!

I've often thought about this in the context of data collected by major sports leagues. They sure are very vocal with their legalese about how they hold all rights to use any of the data that they collect, but I have a strong suspicion that if someone with deep pockets held their feet to the fire, they may not like the result. The PGATour's ShotLink data is an example that comes to mind.

At least in the EU, whether the source is cited/linked or not doesn't make any legal difference: If there's no specific exception to copyright that allows what you're doing, you can't copy something, period. And I'm pretty sure Google's use doesn't hold up as either educational (usually doesn't cover commercial services) or as a quotation (usually requires an original work in which another is quoted for illustration/criticism/commentary).

It may be OK in the US "fair use" system, where it's up to courts to decide what's okay – I don't know the case law well enough.

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