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Google became huge with the public by providing a way to search for data; and they became huge as a business by using this mediation to sell targeted ads.

It's only after they had become truly huge that they started actually serving data directly (news snippets, song lyrics, factual answers, maps, reviews etc).

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.... I dunno what the distinction is...They clearly were scraping all data, in terms of display they extracted pieces of publicly available websites to use as descriptions and titles, and images. They displayed cached versions of websites. So the amount of content you take of the larger body makes the distinction? But as you get larger those rules no longer apply? It doesn't make sense to me.

>So the amount of content you take of the larger body makes the distinction?

Of course. The amount of the original work is one of the key criteria on whether something is fair use or not. And there have been debates over whether Google crosses that line or not.

But no one except the most ardent anti-copyright maximalists would argue that so long as something is available on a public web page, anyone can just reproduce it verbatim and distribute it on their own site. Scrapers do a lot of this anyway but doing anything about it is a wack-a-mole game of publications often don't bother.

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