Bing trying to get exclusive on Fox is smart (Mark Cuban) | Hacker News Reader

Bing trying to get exclusive on Fox is smart (Mark Cuban)

blogmaverick.com

6 pointsqeorge7 comments

Will someone please inform Mr. Cuban that Google's opt-out procedure is entirely voluntary on their part and there's nothing that says they have to continue to offer it or abide by it?

I'm really getting sick of reading about this harebrained idea on HN. There is nothing about it that is smart and I don't understand why anyone cares what this person who doesn't seem to understand any of the basic concepts involved thinks about it.

Google has no legal right to publish materials it doesn't own the copyright to, and that includes almost everything in its index. Their "opt-out" blah blah blah is meaningless. News Corp, the AP, Reuters, the NYTs, McClatchy, will all take microsoft's money and/or sue google for its infractions long before going out of business. If google likewise has to actually pay for material, it will be time to short sell GOOG very hard.

It certainly doesn't have a right to publish those materials. It has every right to index them.

I agree that Google News will need to die if the publishers don't want them to list their news there, but the actual search engine itself?

Indexing is not publishing. How many times do we have to fight this battle?

Indexing and returning results to search queries is not the same as publishing. The cache feature is publishing, but it is easy to remove it without impacting Google in significant way.

"Will someone please inform Mr. Cuban that Google's opt-out procedure is entirely voluntary on their part and there's nothing that says they have to continue to offer it or abide by it?"

Google's policy is irrelevant. NewsCorp owns the intellectual property in question, they decide if and how it may be syndicated. The "thing that says they have to" is United States law.

" I don't understand why anyone cares what this person who doesn't seem to understand any of the basic concepts involved thinks about it."

I'm guessing you have no idea who Mark Cuban is?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Cuban

Copyright law doesn't cover google indexing the page for its search engine anymore than it covers me posting a list of my favorite songs on my blog. Would you argue that someone can't develop a song recommendation engine without acquiring a license for every song in their database? By your argument this very site is infringing the copyrights of all the authors HN ever links to.

I know how to use wikipedia too and did in fact use it. Why should his opinion on this be relevant?

"Copyright law doesn't cover google indexing the page for its search engine anymore than it covers me posting a list of my favorite songs on my blog. Would you argue that someone can't develop a song recommendation engine without acquiring a license for every song in their database? By your argument this very site is infringing the copyrights of all the authors HN ever links to."

This is a straw man. Posting links is different than sending thousands of requests to a server (Googlebot) and archiving the contents. Obviously fair use applies, but Google would not be Google if restricted to fair use.

"Why should [Mark Cuban's] opinion on this be relevant?"

A number of reasons. First that he's been advocating this exact play as the way to beat Google since May 2008 [1].

Second, his experience at the intersection of content and superdistribution (the web) qualifies him to comment on the viability of such a model. He's founded, invested in, and sold more web content companies than any one else I know of (e.g., HDNet, Weblogs Inc, Broadcast.com). And he bankrolled Grokster when MGM took them to the Supreme Court, so he's got a vocal opinion on content usage rights.

All that info is available on Wikipedia of course, but I don't believe you read it and are still asking why his viewpoint is relevant to this discussion.

[1] http://blogmaverick.com/2008/05/14/beating-google/

Reply on news.ycombinator.com