[theamk]

I think you are trying to claim that Google goes further than DVD or netflix, but this analogy is really not working for you.

DVDs have technological protection as well -- the CSS[0] system. So yes, if you don't want your movie to be pirated you need to explicitly enable this. This was probably harder than creating robots.txt too, there were NDAs and stuff involved.

The netflix requires logging in to access the content. If you add the same requirement, then Google is not going to take your snippets.

Unlike the string "nosteal", the robots.txt file is not Google invention, it is as much part of the web standards as all other technologies.

If you want a website, you need a server which can support HTTP, HTML, CSS, links, robots.txt and so on. You can omit parts you don't need, but then you _may_ suffer the consequences -- without CSS your site will be ugly, and without robots.txt your site will be scraped by Google.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_Scramble_System

[willcipriano]

The point is it doesn't matter how hard or how easy it is, Google has no entitlement to anyone else's labor or content and if they post content to their website in violation of copyright I don't think "he didn't say the magic word that stops us from stealing content" is a defence any reasonable judge should entertain.

[theamk]

> in violation of copyright ... defence any reasonable judge should entertain.

Now we are talking specifics! Are you implying that Google is violating the law? Given that the snippet showing has been going for a long time and no one has sued Google for it yet, it does not seem to. Plus, there is the whole Fair Use laws [0].

I personally love that I can take snippets from the random websites on the net, quote them in my posts, and not worry about copyright infringement. And if I can do this, why can't Google?

[0] https://ammori.org/2012/05/08/copyright-misunderstandings-an...

[zo1]

I would argue that the snippet is the thing of value being potentially abused, not the page.

So if I search for e.g. "specific breakdown of something something, in a unique breakdown format that only this website has", then the website owner has worked on, created unique/copyrighted material, and posted it on a page on their site, and Google just extracts that piece, then they might as well have "acquired" the right to host that piece of info on their search results "page".

Google "extracting" that crucial bit of info and essentially "hosting" it on their search results page could definitely be argued to be some sort of abuse of fair-use (and at this point - who is willing or big enough to take on Google on this to set a precedent? The EU, maybe? ). It's not like they're quoting a piece of a large text, they actively find the specific piece of juicy info that relates to your query and host it on their page instead of yours.