[SilkRoadie]

Isn’t their main argument unfair competition? Google, the starting point of the internet, decided to undermine their business by taking their collated content and publishing it at the top of results?

Google appears to do this for other things, asking questions often shows answers without needing to visit the website. Perhaps these are all licensed and there is a kick back for these sites...

Google appear to be serving ads on content other people have collated while eliminating the source of traffic to the original site.. If that isn’t unfair business practice and taking advantage of their monopoly on search I don’t know what is.

[dwheeler]

But companies are absolutely allowed to do things that cause other companies to go out of business. It happens all the time. Think of the buggy whip manufacturers.

"Unfair competetion" has a specific legal meaning. As I understand primarily in the US it's under state law. Here's a summary: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/unfair_competition

I agree that this Google practice looks dodgy to me. But the question is, what law specifically is being broken? This looks like a copyright case, and if that's the issue, then the copyright holder is the generally the one who has to bring the case in. (I believe there are exceptions such as when exclusive rights are granted, but I haven't seen a justification that they apply here.) That's what the law requires; otherwise the courts would be even more swamped.

Again, I'm not a lawyer.

[qtplatypus]

The problem is because the form of unfair competition is copying the copyright act takes charge and the claim must be made under copyright law.