Seriously. Google can’t be legal.
Let’s not even delve too deeply into book archiving hoo hahs or pretty obvious antitrust infringement. The very premise of Google’s fundamental service to us (giving us the ability to search the entire internet) is only possible through web scraping – which is illegal.
Now, I don’t give two hoots about Google’s illegality. I don’t care if they’re building apps right now to ensure the smoother running of all small drug dealing operations. The thing that interests me, is that nobody else seems to give a hoot either.
What does this mean?
- Does it mean that if you do something everyone wants society at large will turn a blind eye as to whether it’s legal or not?
- Is the legal system such an inherently slow-moving beast that it’s waiting to catch up with Google before suing its ass?
- Is it just because its competitors, who would usually be the finger-pointers are, by definition, engaged in the same activities and so therefore have to just keep schtum and carry on?
- Does digital usefulness democratise the law?
I think it’s mostly the first thing and the last thing. Digital innovation happens so quickly that it’s nimble compared to the law that holds it back. And that’s no bad thing, because the law was built in an old world.
Hello! I am an SEO and have thought this very same thing for a long time but have never seen anyone write about it. You can’t take other people’s content, no matter how you slice and dice it. And monetizing it for your own gain with ads? Perhaps this is why companies like Microsoft missed the boat on search. As you point out however the benefits of participation outweigh the copyright infringement. The only people who sue are the French. But they’re still fighting the 100 Years War! Great blog!
It’s not out & out illegal to web-scrape, since effectively all you’re doing is using a script to read what a human would be able to read. Most web spider bots obey robots.txt (btw check out http://last.fm/robots.txt – quite funny if you’re into Asimov) so if you don’t want Google accessing your webpage you can tell them not to via this method & they will stop. Googlebot is one of the more well behaved scripts out there. There are laws against stealing content, and laws regarding computer systems as chattels, but these don’t ban all web scraping.
Hmm…good questions that you ask. Ironically one of their company beliefs is “Don’t be evil.” All things said they are doing some very good things to support the development of the web: supporting HTML5, CSS3, high speed internet access and even Android is open source.
This is a kind of “biting off the hand that feeds you situation” because if everybody squealed, we wouldn’t such rapid access to so much information.
I don’t know about you guys but Google has exponentially increased the amount of information I consume and without it I don’t think I’d know half as much as I do about the web, life and stuff.
Like post though. This could be debated for quite a while over some coffees.
The legality of web scraping seems to be a little less clear than you suggest.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_scraping#Legal_issues
This seems to suggest that it is only illegal if:
a) the bot ignores a robots.txt and is therefore trespassing – which googlebot does not
OR
b) the plaintiff can show damages were caused
However, the law has certainly not been applied consistently in the US and of course varies across countries, making this admittedly a murky area.