[njharman]

You put a resource on an open network and don't use any of the standard, recognized methods to indicate don't index, don't share, (nor lock it away with auth).

It's like if you put a sculpture in front yard and get upset when someone points it out in their neighborhood tour company, even worse cause yard ornaments don't have standard accepted methods of saying "don't use".

Two choices

1) use robots.txt

2) don't put it on the internet

[Silhouette]

You put a resource on an open network and don't use any of the standard, recognized methods to indicate don't index, don't share, (nor lock it away with auth).

This is the kind of argument people used to use as they flagrantly violated your copyright by cloning your article on their own site. "You put it on the Internet, so it's free for everyone to copy."

The law says no such thing, at least not in any jurisdiction that I'm familiar with. Contrary to popular belief in some quarters, normal laws do still apply on the Internet.

If you infringe copyright, it's still infringement even if what you copied was freely available on someone else's site.

And if you state something that is misleading and harmful, it might still be defamation, even if what you stated was just an automatically generated snippet that takes a small part of someone else's site and shows it out of context.

[eitland]

Nah. Take it easy here, there is a long way between indexing and showing the most relevant hit and outright lifting big parts out of the site and use them on their own property:

It is more like if the guide that used to send visitors to your property has set up their own boot on the best spot on the sidewalk next to you and are raking in money because of the useless (often, in the last few years) ads they have plastered all over it.

Even if it is an educational non-profit resource you don't want that as some of the details get lost when visitors only reads the guides summary instead of taking a closer look for themselves.

And according to people on this thread they will also complain and/or come with suggestions about how you can make it even more useful to them.

[didibus]

I think of it more as if you put a banner with content somewhere in the public, and I take a photo of it, what can I later do with that photo?

And for that, it's a question of copyright. It turns out, in the US, if something is publicly available it does not make the copyright a part of the public domain. Thus the original author still retains copyright unless explicitly stated otherwise.

There is an exception to this though, which is called fair use. And for that, I'd recommend reading this: https://amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/411058/ Book snippets by Google searched were deemed fair use.

So the question remains, would website snippet similarly count as fair use? What will the federal courts rule be? And when it comes to fair use, that's the only way to know if it is or not.

[Silhouette]

It's worth pointing out in this context that the US legal concept of fair use is not universal. In fact, unusually for US IP laws, it's actually much more permissive than most other places. The more usual practice is to enumerate specific situations where copying without the copyright holder's consent is still allowed, instead of defining general tests, which is how fair use works. This has been a controversial point, because it's not clear that the US scheme is sufficient to meet its obligations under international treaties.

In answer to your final question, I'm not sure whether this use of snippets in search engine results has been tested in any US courts yet, but the issue of search engines showing enough content from the sites they link to that users never actually go through to the original site is sufficiently controversial that the EU's recently passed copyright directive includes specific provisions aimed at exactly that sort of situation.

[kabacha]

> It is more like if the guide that used to send visitors to your property

Here is where your argument falls apart. The web is a public space - it's not your property or your front yard. It's more akin to going to the town square wearing a fancy hat and getting upset if people look at you and your weirdly shaped headwear.

[tremon]

The web is a public space - it's not your property or your front yard.

You're wrong here. Just because it's a public space does not mean nobody owns the property. As a simple example, a shopping street is usually a public place. That does not mean that all window displays, doorways and adjacent buildings are automatically a free-for-all.

In fact, only "the tubes" of the web are a public space. The rest is owned property, even if there are no visible fences.

[pyrale]

Laws everywhere are pretty much saying your take is wrong. There is no such thing as an implicit contract, and your take on it is plain victim blaming.

It is very surprising to read this on a board where many people write code: if a dev found unlicensed code, they would certainly not think it is public domain.