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Comment by teddyh | Hacker News Reader

The 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 disposal to significantly harm or snuff out a rival.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that our organic rankings have continued to suffer since I’ve become a vocal critic of their practices. Earlier this year, within weeks of the publication of a Wired magazine article that included quotes from me and a recap of our story, the CNW mobile app was banned from the Google Play store without explanation or recourse. As a result we were also banned from using the Google’s dominant Ad Mob mobile ad platform.

This is far more damning of Google abusing its monopoly, not only on search, but also on the Android platform.

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> 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?

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 years as it takes Google to exhaust all legal possibilities, of which there are as many as the defendant has dollars.

The problem is, we don't have a justice system, we have a legal system.

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”

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

So? What does it have to do with having rights over it? You can say that with literally anything.

You go on afterward arguing about inaccurate information, which has nothing to do with the current subject, and still fail to see why it would be important to protect revenue source over information that was curated...

How is Google "Big Knowledge" when the actively play a role in deciding what knowledge gets disseminated or buried? You said yourself the problem is inaccurate information or propaganda which Google is a part of if they're suppressing information they don't like.

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...

The article says they employed a number of researchers to come up with the numbers.

I don't think property records (or any other publicly available information) would be enough to come up with an accurate figure in an automated fashion. So, there's some educated guesses (aka "informed estimations") going on and therefore a form of "creativity" (IMHO).

I agree if the testimony is taken at face value, it makes a pretty reasonable case. However, there's nothing to say that the values he arrived at were accurate (not that it'd necessarily be material to the case) or that his 'researchers' were not just some content farm to write up articles around those numbers in order to enhance SEO. These are the kind of things that'd be deliberated upon in a court case.

I think we agree. If the numbers required actual research they should be copyright-able.

If each entry was individually researched by a person that made judgements by weighing various sources of information against each other to arrive at an estimate, then yes I think they'd have a pretty strong legal argument.

Amusingly, the reality that their net worth figures are (for the most part) made up works to their advantage here.

I'm not sure about that; the mass of the moon to more decimal places would surely require actual research potentially at great expense, but the resulting number shouldn't be copyrightable since the resulting number is a fact about nature.

Why would that be necessary? Google copied celebrities the CNW founder invented out of thin air. Not just their net worth, but their very existence.

Itd be hard to calculate damages for copying the net worths of imaginary people.

I would argue that even the appearance of taking someone else's work should be a damning blow to Google internally. Google prides itself of having some of the world's best academic researchers under their roof, and plagiarism in an academic context is usually a career-ending affair.

I finally understand what people meant when they would say "for some people, the Internet is Google". Google started off as a search engine, and many people were able to search for answers to their questions such that Google's search engine became the de facto platform for question-answering for this group of people. Over time, Google developed capabilities or acquired capabilities in answering questions in growing number of niches e.g. scraping websites for snippets like in this article or acquiring companies that had developed this sort of capabilities like ITA for flights [0]. As a result, the Google platform that is search started to vertically integrate these different niches bit by bit starving out incumbent competitors via prioritization of search results.

I can can think of one analogy that would be more obviously problematic and troubling: imagine a library system spread across a large geographic area with many branches that was wealthy enough to buy their own book publisher. Maybe it starts out with non-fiction and the quality of the published books remains high. What if the library system then started to prefer this associated publisher? At one point, the library network might end up saying that the other non-fiction books published in the same time period are not being lent out enough to be worth stocking, and so removes / puts them away in long-term storage. One day this library system buys a new publisher, but this time it is fiction, but maybe just one genre like adventure or children's books. Then, the same pattern of behavior emerges.

The library system / network I described above sounds like a very useful and successful platform: almost like a public utility.

Another example might be a telegraph / telephone company anytime before ~1950 buying national newspapers.

[0] https://www.google.com/press/ita/comp.html

And these numbers aren't "facts". They're the result of research based on estimates from information about movie deals, real estate investments, business deals, combined with some methodology for producing an estimate based on that. This is particular creative expression of an idea, not just a compilation of facts.

Taking someone else's copy written content and presenting it as your own can be seen as content theft. Imagine if a book author did that to a chapter of a book.

When the one doing it can essential present the case that they should be allowed to do it or they will destroy your business then it's an abuse of power. When they are in a position to actually do it because they have so much of the power in the space it can be argued to be a monopoly and abuse of monopoly power.

Google isn't just copying a number. They are copying text from other sites to present.

> Taking someone else's copy written content […]

(You should read up a bit on this; it’s obvious you have not since you call it “copy written” when the term is “copyright” and a work can therefore be “copyrighted”. The term is about who has the right to copy a given work, and has nothing to do with “writing”.)

Copying text someone else has written is indeed copyright infringement (commonly, but technically inaccurately, called “theft”). Except for the narrowly defined classes of copying called “fair use”, Google would indeed be breaking the law if they did that, but:

> Google isn't just copying a number. They are copying text from other sites to present.

That’s not what the topic was about, and therefore not what my comment was about. My comment concerned the specific case made by the PDF document, which was about Google copying individual dollar amounts, not text.

>(You should read up a bit on this; it’s obvious you have not since you call it “copy written” when the term is “copyright” and a work can therefore be “copyrighted”. The term is about who has the right to copy a given work, and has nothing to do with “writing”.)

Perhaps the parent comment was from some country where things are different, like the language.

Perhaps, but this case was explicitly about US copyright, and may even hinge on the specific intricacies on whether database copyright in US law covers this specific case.

> (You should read up a bit on this; it’s obvious you have not since you call it “copy written” when the term is “copyright” and a work can therefore be “copyrighted”. The term is about who has the right to copy a given work, and has nothing to do with “writing”.)

You used someone’s grammar as a reason to piss all over a reasonable comment, merely because it didn’t 100% validate your own?

You should read up a bit on basic human decency and even confidence. Otherwise, you just look like a know it all who can’t handle learning new things. That’s weak.

Maybe you should realize that merely commenting upon someone’s word choices, inferring inexperience, and providing some elucidation, is not the same as “piss all over”. I mean, nowhere did I say anything else negative about anything in mfer’s comment; I did not even disagree with anything they said!

Ergo, please take your lecturing about “basic human decency” somewhere else.

Maybe, just maybe, you should take the criticism to mean that your intent didn't come across well and that you have an opportunity to improve how you communicate with others.

Food for thought.

Of course I did that, too.

NAL and the only information I have is from a 2 credit intellectual property class I took in college, but facts (like dollar amounts) are not copyrightable, but curated collections of facts (like an almanac) are copyrightable. It seems this would fall under the latter category. Also from the LinkedIn - hiQ Labs lawsuit, it seems that unfair business practices are factored in. Google is implementing unfair business practices that stifle competition by taking the data to make a competing product.

IANAL either. But, there is a difference between taking a straight dollar amount (a fact) and description written that includes the fact.

If all Google did was display the dollar estimate that would be one thing. They go beyond that to include textual content pulled directly from sites.

Thank you for not saying 'IANAL.'

I can't help but to read it, uh, the 'other' way, and I always think "well there's nothing wrong with that, but why bring it up here?"

Copywriting ("copy[,] written") is an industry term.

True, but that term means something completely different from what was discussed here, and the sentence does not make sense if you assume that meaning. It’s quite obvious to me that they, like many others, erroneously thought of “copyright” as “copywrite”.

It's much less clear in this case. What about displaying the title of the website, is that ok? Just about everyone would say yes. What about the first few sentences of the page? Ok, I think we are good here, probably ok. What about an intelligent snippet of the website that highlights your search terms? Well, ok we are starting to get a bit gray, because now for some searches we don't need to go to the website anymore. But is it wrong or illegal? Well what about formatting that in a nice way that prominently displays the answer to your query? Well now we have an issue, but how big of a leap was it to get there? But is it wrong because they targeted the website and built parsers specifically for it, or because it is done at all? I don't know. But I think it was a slippery slope that got them there.

Just because it wasn't illegal (or questionably legal) yesterday doesn't mean we can't make it illegal tomorrow.

I would surmise that the most popular laws ever written by humanity, collectively, started with a bunch of people thinking some version of "That behavior is questionable."

So sure, the last part is bad too. But that statement was being provide to people who write new laws. Not quite understanding why the current legality of Google's copying is that significant in that context.

The "it's not illegal" game is what every dominant company or powerful mobster wants you to play. Because it's their game and they spend a great deal of money to ensure they always win.

Yes. Therefore, if we want to win, we should not play that game. Which is why I pointed to something else in the document which much more strongly implicated wrongdoing by Google.

Also a great deal of money to shape what's legal.

> but might not be illegal, since simple numbers like a dollar amount can’t be copyrighted

It might be the case in the USA but there this thing called "Database right": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right

In the case of the business in question, they employed people and spent resources to create that database. It's only fair if they get compensated for their work if the numbers that they collected is to be copied.

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.

>>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).

Forbes for one spends a LOT of money hiring people to try to estimate the net-worth. So it is a number--but one that someone paid a lot of money to get it. Illegal? Maybe. Not-ethical? Very much so IMO

Then protect it with a non-disclosure agreement and don’t make it public. But certainly you can’t copyright it.

Databases do have copyright protection under EU law if they are original.

Well, yes; I did say it was questionable.

How do you know how much money they spend?

No, but I've read of them calling several people, looking at documents people send to prove their worth etc etc. Still money

A curated database like this can be copyrighted. The author even mentions this in the article, that the net worth numbers are not considered as commodity information like the height of a famous building.

He says that the information was hard for him to obtain, but he does not actually, what I can see, argue that the information is covered by copyright.

> This is far more damning of Google abusing its monopoly, not only on search, but also on the Android platform.

No, it’s really not. I just visited celebritynetworth.com. One article took 462 http requests, loaded 9mb of content and though DOM content loaded in 434ms, it took 1 minute to finish loading everything.

The sheer amount of adware on this site is staggering.

Let’s put down the pitchforks and put on our critical thinking caps. Does serving all that adware provide anything close to an acceptable user experience?? And if not, doesn’t it look more like this website merely fell out of search engine fashion as things like performance and UX began to trump other factors?

So they deserve to have their content hijacked (unattributed) by Google?

Here’s a fun rabbit hole for you to go down. Find CNW’s article on 6ix9ine and compare it to his Wikipedia page. Then take his reported earnings and subtract relevant taxes.

You’ve totally glossed over the fact that there was an additional slide in the rankings after the site owner went public with this story. And what about the app being banned from the App Store?

Why would someone go through the trouble of compiling extensive research for free? Ads pay for things that people want but are unwilling to actually spend dollars on. That’s the state of things, whether we like it or not. Don’t hate the player, hate the game.

I think that again, we need to put our pitchforks down and think through this critically. Maybe someone from Google did decide that CNW is about to blow the lid on their scam and decide to shit all over its business model. But let’s step back for an instant and think over some other possibilities.

Google released some pretty major core updates in 2018 and 2019. A lot of these updates seemed to focus on what the SEO community has taken to refer to as EAT (expertise, authority and trust). Google’s own guidance on some of these indicate a similar theme - they’re interested in sources, quality of analysis and other trust metrics. Some major sites saw some really massive drops over these years.

When I checked out CNW earlier on today, I read a couple of articles. There were no sources at all. The net worth calculation seems to be the individual’s reported earnings less state and federal taxes. And the content looks like it was lifted from Wikipedia - in some cases, entire sentences were reprinted word for word.

To get that, my browser had to make 426 requests, download 9mb of mostly adware and display ads almost everywhere.

Maybe this is all a big Google ploy but I think it’s more likely that their algorithm has changed to favour high quality sites as opposed to sites that used to get search performance because of valuable keywords in their domain.

As for their Android app, I’ve never owned a phone that runs Android so I can’t find and download an Android version but I decided to go down the rabbit hole and install CNW in my iPhone. They’ve apparently been ad free for two years, which is nicer than their web experience. But the content is the same kind of stuff as their website - entire sentences seem lifted directly from Wikipedia, their news section is similar, it’s just slightly repackaged stories from other sources.

Thanks to today, I now know that Takeshi 6ix9ine made $5m for a livestream which pushed his net worth to a reported $8 million. I’ve never felt so old or out of touch in my life...:)

Just curious - how do you know it's lifted from Wikipedia vs. the other way around? It's quite hard to trace the sources.

E.g. did a quick search for Jerry Seinfeld, CNW is a lot more robust than Wikipedia (or the inc. magazine article it cites)

> I now know..

You prove it is an acceptable user experience. Of course it's easy to scroll past ads.

When I read Encyclopedia Brittanica, there are no sources. Yes, it's a pain in the butt to grab the book off of the shelf, but it'd still be wrong for Google to copy it.

If the data is no better than Wikipedia, why didn't Google copy Wikipedia? With all their PhDs and $100M bonuses, they could not do better. They copied CNW because the CNW dataset was better. The fakes prove it. To deny the CNW's data's worth is illogical, pitchforks or no pitchforks.

Any right or principle worth defending will always apply to you as well as to people you don't like.

I get your point but I went down a CNW rabbit hole and I’ve got to tell you, there isn’t a whole lot of original reporting being done. There are no sources and in many cases (6ix9ine is a great example), the content seems to be a rewrite of his Wikipedia page. In other cases, entire sentences are reprinted verbatim from Wikipedia. The net worth calculation is basically reported earnings less relevant taxes. For major celebrities, they seem to rely on publications like Forbes and Business Insider coverage.

Maybe if they served up some of Google's AMP™ pages they would get higher search rankings.

I know you are being sarcastic but it would result in a 10x better experience for the user.

The joke I'm trying to make is that if they had a much nicer site design it still wouldn't be ranked higher. It would only be ranked higher if and only if Amp was used... because of bias.

Actually, they use AMP. I read the 6ix9ine article on AMP and it was a much nicer mobile experience.

That's not the issue OP is addressing. If Google is ranking them lower because it's a slow, crappy, ad-ridden site, that's understandable. It's stealing their data and presenting it as their own that's the problem here.

A site being badly designed does not mean they're suddenly not protected by copyright.

As I mentioned to another commenter, I took a deep down into the CNW rabbit hole and even downloaded their app. I read a few articles and compared them to the individuals’ Wikipedia pages. The content appears to be a mild rewrite of their Wikipedia pages and in many cases, entire sentences are copied verbatim.

As for net worth, near as I can tell, for minor celebrities, they take their reported earnings, subtract relevant taxes and call that their net worth. For major celebrities, they seem to rely on Forbes and/or Business Insider as their sources.

It's not just the numbers though. It's a database of names with numbers, all clearly stolen.

I'm pretty sure it's covered by copyright infringement laws.

Can ficticious characters be copyrighted? Google stole those from home too.

Given enough time tinkering with the prompt, and assuming the Wired article and website were in the training data, I think GPT-3 could probably suss out the relationship between the critical comments in Wired and the net worth website. It clearly can identify sentiment and maybe from that even infer the strained relationship of the site to Google

Seems plausible that Search could autonomously and possibly without human intent begin deranking sites that directly or indirectly surface negative opinions. At some point we could quite literally have to worry about hurting the feelings of our search engines.

Just tried this through AI Dungeon to see what happens:

Prompt

You are Bob Warner, founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com, and are speaking at a hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Antitrust, Commercial and Administrative Law. The subject is Google. You start your testimony as follows:

"Thank you, Chairman Cicilline, Ranking Member Sensenbrenner, Committee Chair Nadler and Ranking Member Collins,

GPT-3 Response

for inviting me to testify today about Google's anticompetitive conduct in the search market. I am honored that my company, CelebrityNetWorth.com, has been chosen by the subcommittee to speak on this important issue.

I want to begin by thanking the members of this committee for their interest in our industry. As you know, we are an information technology business that provides Internet marketing services to small businesses and individuals. We have been providing these services since 1996. Our service allows users to post advertisements on the Internet in exchange for money. In addition, we provide other services such as web hosting and e-mail services.

CelebrityNetWorth.com is an information website that provides public information about celebrities. It was founded in 2008 and has been very successful. We do not collect user information; we simply provide the public with information about celebrities. For example, on our website, you can find out how much money Kim Kardashian is worth.

We have thousands of users and track over 3 million individuals. We get a combined 6 million monthly page views. We receive an average of 75,000 unique visitors per month. We are very successful and I thank this subcommittee for the help it has given us over the years.

Our website has had many successes, but our crowning achievement was exposing Google for the shakedown racket that it is. Our story began in 2006 when we tried to enter the search engine market. At that time, Google had a near monopoly in the search engine market.

In 2009, we applied to be listed in the Google search engine as a secondary link. We went through all the proper channels and even paid money to Google. After we paid them, our website's popularity increased substantially.

Then I backed off the context quite a bit. (Note I prompt for Google in the middle) Doesn't surface the conflict noted in the PDF but makes an interesting observation about FaceBook.

Prompt

You are Bob Warner, founder of CelebrityNetWorth.com, and are having lunch with an old friend of yours named Phil. You're discussing what the last ten years has been like with the site and some of the major challenges you've faced. The conversation goes as follows:

Phil: Hey Bob, I've been thinking about how much things have changed over the years and how you've had to adapt to keep up with them. What would you say are some of the major challenges you've had keeping CelebrityNetWorth.com up and running and making money?

GPT-3 Response

Bob: Well, it's a combination of several factors. One is that we've always tried to stay on top of all the new sites popping up and trying to get our content out there first. We were also lucky enough to be in business long before most other sites were. So even though we started off small, we've managed to grow into one of the largest sites around. Another factor is that we've always kept our prices low because we didn't want to compete with free sites. Nowadays, many people can get their information for free but they still charge a lot of money for their services. So we offer a good deal for our users and we've found that they keep coming back to us.

We also realized that we had to start diversifying our income streams because advertising alone just isn't enough anymore. There's so much out there that it's actually really hard to keep people's attention, and a lot of people block ads nowadays.

Prompt

Phil: What do you think about Google?

GPT-3 Response

Bob: I've been getting a lot of questions about them. I don't think they're a threat to us because we offer way more information than they do. We're not in competition with them.

However, I'm getting a little worried about Facebook. I see them moving into our turf by creating their own "Celebrity Pages" and getting content from their users.

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