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Comment by lalaland1125 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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Some things are facts, like the density of steel or the list of historical US presidents. But other things aren't facts, and where something isn't a fact but instead is implicit knowledge derived from a set of both data and assumptions (like a model or an algorithm) Google should absolutely not be taking that data and treating it as their own. Given the PDF includes this quote "I decided to build a company that attempted to make educated guesses based on the sourcing of a full-time research team." I think we can assume that the data on CelebrityNetWorth wasn't "facts".

However, even if CelebrityNetWorth's data were facts, I don't believe Google should be able allowed to replicate the work that people have put in to building a website that lists facts. Google could, and eventually probably will, replace every fact based website with a sidebar in their results page. People can't compete with that. That's using Google's (de facto) search results monopoly to stop people searching the web. That's making the web worse. That's stifling innovation. I might be able to dream up some way of using CelebrityNetWorth data to improve the world (somehow...), and Google would be stopping that.

The engineers who work at Google need to stop ruining the web by trying to turn it in to their own walled garden.

This is interesting. The final outcome could be that CNW shuts down. Then, the data won’t be updated. So then google will have to drop the info box. And then someone will come along with an idea to track the net worth of celebrities...

Has Google set up some kind of hysteresis that results in the long term, repeated building and subsequent crushing of data aggregation companies?

> Then, the data won’t be updated. So then google will have to drop the info box

Google won't drop the info box, they don't care if the information is accurate.

Have you read the written statement? He says that it's not commodity information like the height of a building or the the current time.

Just like Forbes, they employed a team of fact-checkers to find and generate estimates. Knowing the exact net worth of a celebrity isn't just a fact that someone can determine and so for Google to steal that information, which is the result of research and scrutiny is wrong.

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...

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

try looking up the material properties of some commonly used alloys and see how much is:

1) available but unreliable

2) on a materials data sheet that must be purchased

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