this post was submitted on 04 Dec 2023
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As if they had permission to take it in the first place
It's a hugely grey area but as far as the courts are concerned if it's on the internet and it's not behind a paywall or password then it's publicly available information.
I could write a script to just visit loads of web pages and scrape the text contents of those pages and drop them into a big huge text file essentially that's exactly what they did.
If those web pages are human accessible for free then I can't see how they could be considered anything other than public domain information in which case you explicitly don't need to ask the permission.
Google provides sample text for every site that comes up in the results, and they put ads on the page too. If it's publicly available we are well past at least a portion being fair use.
A portion is legally protected. ALL data, not so much. Court cases on going.
But Google displays the relevant portion! How could it do that without scraping and internally seeing all of it?