Are search engines legal ?
 

A good question from some searchengine board:

Isn't Google violating copyrights when it "steals" content from your site and display's it on thier SERPS? And stores your pages in "cache"
Google is making money from other people content without permission or any type of compensation.

I know most poeople are happy to have Google display their content - but theoretically couldn't somebody sue Google for copyright violations?

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh

Then so is archive.org

BTW - I'm not laughing like Neff - I think it could be a serious question :2 cents:

if it's illegal to steal Huns listings, how come Google can steal ours ?

we do not submitt to it (and agree to some terms) - it crawls on its own and takes what it wants

Not to mention it links to porn like a tgp. When it links to "obscene" content are they at risk of prosecution?

robots.txt

you don't get it, do you ?

Don't want Google to cache your page?

Put this on the page in the head:
<meta name="GOOGLEBOT" content="NOARCHIVE"></meta>

the existence of robots.txt by itself would make it very, very hard to win a lawsuit against them :2 cents:

:thumbsup :thumbsup :thumbsup

Ugh-huh! Scary gizmo coming!!! Googlebot!!!!

This thing was discussed near year ago.

And...

"Hey! You steal my content! " - "Nope. You just a lame content - master. And you just lost your hits\hosts and want to blame Google."

isn't coming up with robots.txt exuse like telling a person to lock his house so it doesnt get robbed ?

Sounds that way to me. That's putting the work on the webmaster to keep google from stealing their work instead of google making sure they don't take what people want left alone.

Sure as fuck didn't work for Napster did it.

And what about obscenity and cp. Google has url's to it but if someone else did they would be in legal trouble.

No. Having a house doesn't imply wanting complete and utter strangers to run all over it. Putting up a website, however, does imply wanting complete and utter strangers to visit it. In houses, being private is the standard, on the internet, being public is the standard.

Soo... I can hotlink every picture I find that isn't protected because .htaccess? ...and movies? Sweet!

Big difference: robots.txt doesn't disable robots, it just tells them "we'd rather not have you at this site or these directories". It is assumed that anything on the internet is meant for public viewing, unless something different is said.

Hotlinking touches a very different issue, namely unauthorized server/bandwidth theft. Not visitors to webpages which still include all advertising, but visitors to specific files which obviously do not include advertising and such.

But apart from that, hotlinking is not illegal as far as I know, and might very well hold up in court. It's against Netiquette though, but that is something different altogether.

First: You put your information "on air" and want visitors.
Second: You want to advertise your info and use SE for it

And now you complain that best SE "steal" your content.

Hey, make peer2peer or work through the IRC servers - you can approve every transaction and every IP.

Who said ?
I neither want to advertise nor use SE for it.

Putting a site most certainly does imply that you want people to visit your site, and want it to get known. It's the internet, not a local intranet.
What you seem to be arguing is that if you put up a television station, that doesn't mean you want people watching it.

ok, i want people visiting my site.
but i dont want nobody stealing my content and links.
I could make some script and let it spider Hun for his links and then just tell Hun to install robots.txt

That's *copying* the database of a *specific* site.
However, if you were to spider The Hun and a whole bunch of other sites, would honor robots.txt and robots metatags, and would rank all of them by a unique algorithm you would most likely be in the clear.

Links in general are not seen as private. You could equate them to roads irl - anyone can map them if he wants, unless someone puts up a sign "private road".

I am with you Dark Jedi. I heard someone recently mention that Google is a parasite and that term fits. Obviously none of us would really want to avoid google but what they do is very questionable. They cache the page and they have a special bot that grabs our images. The actual database part is legal in that you can link to anyone you want.
I am not sure if we can legally link to CP. I know the finnish Juoppo Jarmon was closed in that country and it is just a link list. So google should watch out there.

Interesting topic, I think we definitely have a case, but it'll be quite expensive to battle them in court.

BTW, Yahoo's new search promotes Image search more prominently now:
http://search.yahoo.com

it would be an interesting case, definitely not cut and dry. Wasn't there a case about 'deep linking' that got a lot of publicity recently? There was the case against 'Ditto.com' which is an image search engine just like Google's Image Search. I forget
how that case turned out, the site is still around so I'm assuming
it went Ditto's way.

I still don't what the hell is up with those Usenet binaries sites like GUBA. I was certain that these types of sites were found guilty of copyright infringement but there are so many of them that apparently it must be legal, maybe the case I read was overturned on an appeal? I'm not talking about a web based interface to access Usenet - nothing controversial about that. I'm talking about sites like GUBA who actually take the photos and videos and make thumbnails of them and have them on their servers. The defense these sites usually use is that they are ISP's, no different than your cable provider or the local dialup ISP.
But come on, GUBA is nothing more than a porn paysite.


The one I really don't understand is About.com, they frame your site, they frame all links from their directory. I'm pretty sure you can't legally trap somebody else's site in a frame. I know I've had letters from big companies telling me to knock it off.

I'm not trying to bash google here, google brings food to my table and I love it.
It's just having a Masters Degree in Laws I'm trying to figure it all out from a legal point of view.

Yes, Susie Blue that made a website on a $5 a month host for her friends to see her cheerleader pajama party pics and got raped by the google porn searches should have known to put robots.txt in her html even though she made it with an editor. Get real. :1orglaugh

Your are talking ethics, not law.

Btw, you don't put a robots.txt in your html.

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/norobots.html

To make Legal Question we need to have definition of the "dos" and "donts" of SE.

Look when G' cashied your site it cash it in a whole with all the banners and notices. So it store the ownership and credits.

But when it grabb the pic's from the context it is some kind of violation of copyright. But in a G' Image Search user can see only the "thumbs" (tahks to adult biz). Actual size shown only with other content of site and in the context of the site content.

It is specific of "search" - SE gives correct answer on the correct question.

Thanks to Mutt: "deep links" - next big case after "text link" case.
"I luv dat mud" they stir without any result over the Internet.

So what ur saying is that I could be violating you (that sounds odd :Graucho) in some way because I surf the net and my computer caches your site ?

Or lets go a step further ... I surf a porn site and I see a girl I like, so I look at all her pics and come back from time to time to the same page. So i have a mental image (stored in my head) of your content. Does that mean I am a content theif?

Bah. give me 100000 google bots and I will welcome them with open arms.

And lets not forget the fact that Microsoft windows allows the downloading and file sharing of illegal mp3's. They even have a mp3 player installed as part of their software!

Sue Microsoft aswell.

Nope. I will sue your PC manufacturer, your Internet provider and shopassistant who sells the PC for the stealing my pic's
Sure does. If you still store this pic's in your mind ... Hey!! You miss your weekly brainwashing!!! Clean your cash.

:glugglug