Judge Rejects Google's Attempt to DMCA Its Way Out of Being Scraped

xbar

Hypocrisy-rich.

guardiangod

“You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen, and I think it quite ungentlemanly."

ChrisArchitect

Source: Google vs. SerpApi: The Court Granted Our Motion to Dismiss https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48995411

thisislife2

I am somewhat confused - does this mean we can all now legally scrape Google search results?

jonatron

It's quite important that SERPs are scrapeable, because they keep advertising scams like ETA/ESTA sites: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56886957

binarymax

I'd be more OK with this if Google had a good API for their search results. But they've deprecated it, and now there is no alternative. So I'll continue to use 3rd parties that scrape Google results, until they change their mind.

super256

If only GPT wouldn't refuse my requests to write a crawler for $site. :(

paul7986

What about them taking content for their AI summaries? Have they created a system that gets content owners and creators paid in this regard yet?

beloch

This ruling might feel good viscerally, but it also reinforces Googles own scraping as perfectly legal. At its inception, Google probably viewed this lawsuit as win-win. Either they successfully sue a competitor into oblivion or establish a precedent that will protect themselves in the future. Google lost, but they still won.

Imustaskforhelp

(IANAL) I think that the deeper thing from this lawsuit is that from my understanding, (inherently) Search engines are considered public indexes and the data (URL's,index) behind it is considered uncopyrighted and as such aren't protected by DMCA because DMCA only works for copyrighted contents and thus the dismissal of the lawsuit by the Judge. Basically, search engines are publicly scrapable, though I do wonder as from a law point of view, that it must be within the murky waters as to what a search engine means in terms of seperating its search engine code/its recomendation engine and the public data much of which are intertwined with each other. I believe that the argument that could be made is that the recommendation engine is the way it is because of all the data and its unseperable to really copyright the whole mechanism in all its glory. Speaking of which, it seems that AI models feel really similar. Does this judge lawsuit show that AI model weights aren't copyrightable as well? If a search engine is built on public indexes then so are the AI models. I was just writing similar comment on another thread but it seems to be the case, definitely worth a blog article or thinking more about perhaps this judgement by this judge itself in general as well, I just have a vibe that this judgement has pretty far reaching consequences in its impact.

dmix

DMCA needs to be reformed one day.

akrymski

EU protects a database creator if there has been a qualitative or quantitative "substantial investment" in obtaining, verifying, or presenting the content, regardless of creative expression. In USA copyright requires a minimum degree of original creativity in the selection, coordination, or arrangement of the data. I think it's a rather grey line to say that Google search results are just facts, but eg maps are copyrightable. There's a rather large amount of effort involved in crawling and ranking the web - the PageRank itself should be copyrightable.

SoftTalker

> The whole thing was just “we don’t like that this is happening, so we’re suing.” Typical behavior from a big company with immense resources. They probably thought they would get a settlement or SerpAPI could not afford to fight. I assume they are pretty small, at least in comparison to Google (I've never heard of them). Google has so much money that even a "loser pays" requirement on litigation probably would not disuade them.

dude250711

Having good thoughts about Google is kind of nostalgic!

stefan_lec

Where’s my nanometer-sized violin? Always losing that darn thing …

1saadcodes

The irony is that Google's success was built on crawling and indexing the open web. I understand wanting to protect your product, but once you remove affordable APIs and then object to third parties filling that gap, you're creating demand for the very behavior you're trying to discourage

luciana1u

the company that built its empire by indexing every page on the internet without asking is now suing people for reading its pages without asking

1vuio0pswjnm7

Missing from this blog post is that the suit was filed because OpenAI was using SerpApi to collect Google search results Alphabet is an Anthropic investor Looking forward to the Amended Complaint by August 10 https://searchengineland.com/inside-google-searchguard-46767...