Re: Neat summary of Google strategy

> Well.... That is less than a choice; more a gun to the head.
> But my point was that robots.txt cannot distinguish content,
> which seemed the matter being pursued earlier. However, the
> suggestion you now add, that Google offers something in
> return, ignores both that other search engines exist, and
> that Google does not have the right to usurp the law of the
> land.

I'm not sure what you mean by "distinguish content." You write the  
robots.txt file. You do the distinguishing. The robots.txt file  
communicates that information to the search engine. Other search  
engines do pretty much exactly what Google does: crawl the web, copy  
pages, rank them and spit out those rankings.

<snip about web sites>
>> Holding of books on their databases, without an agreement
> with the appropriate licence holder is a breach of law and
> colloquially theft, which is made worse with the threat of
> publishing the material without reference to the owner or
> holder.
>

But we were talking about web sites, not about ebooks or databases.  
What I have been saying may or may not apply to ebooks or databases  
because those weren't what I was talking about.

>> you can also send a DMCA takedown and very likely get
>> removed from the
>> cache and index altogether.
>
> Which makes Google look like the breacher of rights it is.

Which is also like shooting yourself in the foot.

>> I don't think this one could be litigated without
>> involving a lot of
>> laughter at your expense.
>
> It depends which content you mean. My concern is books.

But that wasn't what I was talking about. So we might as well have  
this same conversation all over again because I'm not sure that I  
would advocate books being treated the same way as web content. There  
are notable differences between the two forms.

> But
> online content is also copyright, and any stated terms for
> use are still legal and expected to be followed by any
> responsible organisation or individual. Appearance on a
> webpage or in an ebook does not make the content fair game
> for all comers.

Except neither the web nor search engines work that way. And everyone  
who participates in this great thing we call the World Wide Web pretty  
much agrees to "how it works" with a wink and a nod, if not outright  
ignorance. You can, if you wish, prevent your site from being  
spidered. You can, if you wish, forgo the traffic that search engines  
generate. You can, if you wish, prohibit the copying of your site onto  
proxy servers (yep, there are tags for that too). You can, if you  
wish, prohibit people from copying your pages into memory by locking  
down your whole site with a password so no one can see anything!

Or, you can accept that the way the web works doesn't fit into  
classical paradigms of copyright law and that times they are a  
changin' no matter what the most strict interpretation of the law is.  
Ah, we have come to Godwin's Law for Writers: every argument among  
writers comes down to prescriptive vs descriptive (linguistics),  
except here, we're dealing with the slightly less esoteric "strict  
interpretation of the law" vs "reality."

> Frankly Google's use of the 'fair use'
> argument is mere 800lb gorilla challenge, not a valid claim;
> deep pockets always win in a litigious society, and the law
> is made a nonsense of '...a h'ass'..
>

Until someone litigates it, Google can say whatever it wants. When  
someone litigates it, then the courts will have a chance to rule.  
Until then... **shrug.**

>>>> I still fail to see merit in the orphan works argument. It
> makes no difference whether you or I know who is the holder
> or owner of rights. It is still not ours to do with as we
> wish. If, for any particular work, there is a case to be
> made then that is where the courts fit the bill of deciding.

With the term of copyright exceeding the life span of "generations"  
and with large corporations pushing for ever longer terms (and getting  
them), the orphan woks problem is going to be bigger and bigger and  
bigger.

> Actually I would like to see  *any* satisfactory argument
> for *any* 'orphan work' being vital to be reprinted. The ony
> thing that seems to me to enter into it is pound or dollar
> signs in someone's eyes. The idea that because someone would
> like a copy of something they had a right to assume decision
> making on it applies in no other commercial field I know of.

The why reprint public domain works? They can't possibly be anything  
but interchangable with anything currently in print. I mean, they are  
slightly older, so they aren't marketable in the least. No money to be  
made there... oh, wait... the market for such books is HUGE. And some  
of them actually do appear to be unique. And people want them!

The reason why this sort of this is like no other commercial field is  
because IP is like no other commercial field.

I'm actually the owner of a piece of IP that is commonly assumed to be  
an orphan work. It's a font I designed back in 1993 that still floats  
around the net. The Emacs groups supposedly wanted to use it as their  
default font but could not find the rights holder to ask if they could  
distribute it. It didn't make the distro.

Anyway,

dej

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