[wombatmobile]

Right on, Jeff8.

And when Teddyh says "simple numbers like a dollar amount can’t be copyrighted" he's ignoring the fact that google isn't just copying dollar amounts. Google's copying a data set which establishes a dollar amount as a net worth of a particular person. That's a database.

The only difficulty for CNW will be coming up with the money, time, and emotional energy to achieve a result in court over as many years as it takes Google to exhaust all legal possibilities, of which there are as many as the defendant has dollars.

The problem is, we don't have a justice system, we have a legal system.

[scoopertrooper]

The mere fact that he compiled the database isn't sufficient to qualify for copyright protection. He'll have to show that he used a sufficient level of creativity to arrive at the numbers he displayed.

Based on his testimony, I suspect he'd have a reasonable case to argue, but he'd have to show that his researchers carefully weighed different sources and made other judgements for each individual celebrity rather than just running some script over public property records.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyright_in_lists#C...

[mthoms]

The article says they employed a number of researchers to come up with the numbers.

I don't think property records (or any other publicly available information) would be enough to come up with an accurate figure in an automated fashion. So, there's some educated guesses (aka "informed estimations") going on and therefore a form of "creativity" (IMHO).

[scoopertrooper]

I agree if the testimony is taken at face value, it makes a pretty reasonable case. However, there's nothing to say that the values he arrived at were accurate (not that it'd necessarily be material to the case) or that his 'researchers' were not just some content farm to write up articles around those numbers in order to enhance SEO. These are the kind of things that'd be deliberated upon in a court case.

[mthoms]

I think we agree. If the numbers required actual research they should be copyright-able.

[esrauch]

I'm not sure about that; the mass of the moon to more decimal places would surely require actual research potentially at great expense, but the resulting number shouldn't be copyrightable since the resulting number is a fact about nature.

[scoopertrooper]

If each entry was individually researched by a person that made judgements by weighing various sources of information against each other to arrive at an estimate, then yes I think they'd have a pretty strong legal argument.

[SpelingBeeChamp]

Amusingly, the reality that their net worth figures are (for the most part) made up works to their advantage here.

[SpelingBeeChamp]

Why would that be necessary? Google copied celebrities the CNW founder invented out of thin air. Not just their net worth, but their very existence.

[scoopertrooper]

Itd be hard to calculate damages for copying the net worths of imaginary people.

[tareqak]

I would argue that even the appearance of taking someone else's work should be a damning blow to Google internally. Google prides itself of having some of the world's best academic researchers under their roof, and plagiarism in an academic context is usually a career-ending affair.

I finally understand what people meant when they would say "for some people, the Internet is Google". Google started off as a search engine, and many people were able to search for answers to their questions such that Google's search engine became the de facto platform for question-answering for this group of people. Over time, Google developed capabilities or acquired capabilities in answering questions in growing number of niches e.g. scraping websites for snippets like in this article or acquiring companies that had developed this sort of capabilities like ITA for flights [0]. As a result, the Google platform that is search started to vertically integrate these different niches bit by bit starving out incumbent competitors via prioritization of search results.

I can can think of one analogy that would be more obviously problematic and troubling: imagine a library system spread across a large geographic area with many branches that was wealthy enough to buy their own book publisher. Maybe it starts out with non-fiction and the quality of the published books remains high. What if the library system then started to prefer this associated publisher? At one point, the library network might end up saying that the other non-fiction books published in the same time period are not being lent out enough to be worth stocking, and so removes / puts them away in long-term storage. One day this library system buys a new publisher, but this time it is fiction, but maybe just one genre like adventure or children's books. Then, the same pattern of behavior emerges.

The library system / network I described above sounds like a very useful and successful platform: almost like a public utility.

Another example might be a telegraph / telephone company anytime before ~1950 buying national newspapers.

[0] https://www.google.com/press/ita/comp.html

[an_opabinia]

Nobody forces you to (checks notes) create celebrity net worth databases.

I just feel like we live in a time with more information than ever, the problem clearly being inaccurate information or propaganda. The problem isn’t insufficient marginal knowledge. Obviously we live in this high knowledge world because of, not despite, Google, so it’s hard to see if you’d really be on the right side of justice if you’re against “big knowledge”

[dwild]

> Nobody forces you to (checks notes) create celebrity net worth databases.

So? What does it have to do with having rights over it? You can say that with literally anything.

You go on afterward arguing about inaccurate information, which has nothing to do with the current subject, and still fail to see why it would be important to protect revenue source over information that was curated...

[nkrisc]

How is Google "Big Knowledge" when the actively play a role in deciding what knowledge gets disseminated or buried? You said yourself the problem is inaccurate information or propaganda which Google is a part of if they're suppressing information they don't like.