Timeline for Do search engines need permission to start searching?
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
15 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 23, 2019 at 12:35 | comment | added | mic | It was ruled in 2006 that Google's cache does not violate copyright: pinsentmasons.com/out-law/news/… | |
| Apr 4, 2018 at 2:15 | comment | added | Laurel | "Archiving and especially re-displaying someone's content is [...] not legal" Are you sure? This sounds like exactly what Google's cache does. | |
| Apr 2, 2018 at 17:16 | comment | added | user17346 | @jeffronicus Exactly. Search engines display links and a brief description of what the link is about. They don't display the actual content. That's my point, if a person uses a search engine using the aforementioned process also applies other processes such as using meta data. This would imply that the resulting links want to be found and therefore no question of illegality. Am I correct or are there still some aspects which I don't understand? | |
| Apr 2, 2018 at 16:47 | comment | added | jeffronicus | @kevin For example, if my website consists of short movie reviews, those reviews are my copyrighted content. If your search engine displays the full text of my review in your results, I'm going to see that as a violation of my copyright, especially since it eliminates the incentive for anyone to come to my site. Somewhere between "zero" and "a substantial amount" of my content will be acceptable. Google, Bing, etc. rely on algorithms to determine what pages are "about" and display that content -- sometimes a summary, sometimes an excerpt -- in search results. | |
| Apr 2, 2018 at 5:35 | comment | added | user17346 | I'm not sure I understand what you guys mean by 'copyright portions'. I mean, how Google and other search engines work is that a user enters keyword(s) in the search bar and the crawler crawls and displays links related to the keywords. Sometimes there are images, videos etc related to the keywords but ultimately when you click on any one of the links you are taken back to the original website. Then where exactly does the copyright issue arise? | |
| Apr 1, 2018 at 22:23 | comment | added | jeffronicus | There have been ongoing battles over what content can be displayed in search results. Google has largely won the right to display copies of images from websites, but recently agreed to no longer off the full-resolution files in image search: arstechnica.com/gadgets/2018/02/… Also, beyond robots.txt files, a server administrator also has mechanisms to prevent crawlers from accessing their site, since having all your pages trawled on a regular basis by multiple bots can be annoying. | |
| Apr 1, 2018 at 19:40 | history | edited | user6726 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 1, 2018 at 19:20 | comment | added | Brandin | @Kevin The worst that is likely to happen is that a site operator will ban your crawlers. If your site's results show significant copyrighted portions of other pages (e.g. images, verbatim text from the web site), the owner could claim copyright infringement and sue you. | |
| Apr 1, 2018 at 19:18 | comment | added | feetwet♦ | I think what you say about "redisplay ... not legal" is incorrect, or at least missing some nuance. Otherwise archive.org, as the first example that springs to mind, would not exist. | |
| Apr 1, 2018 at 19:16 | history | edited | feetwet♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
Copy edited.
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| Apr 1, 2018 at 17:32 | history | edited | user6726 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 1, 2018 at 17:15 | comment | added | user17346 | So I can just put out my search engine and start crawling the websites and displaying their results without any worries? That's what you are saying, right? | |
| Apr 1, 2018 at 17:12 | comment | added | user17346 | Look, I'll be honest. I didn't understand a lot of the things you said. I understand a few things , however, even before you said them such as you can't just copy someone's property. But I'm not asking about any kind of copying or stealing of property. I want to know that if I had a brand new search engine which I wanted to put out there to display results, do I have to get permission from the trillions of owners out there to crawl their websites or can I can i crawl their websites just the same and if they want privacy password-protect or whatever their websites for that? Please clarify. | |
| Apr 1, 2018 at 17:07 | history | edited | user6726 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Apr 1, 2018 at 16:59 | history | answered | user6726 | CC BY-SA 3.0 |