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by awesomeMilou 1044 days ago
In the case of Google, merely indexing content is not considered fair use. It's a double edged sword, as media outlets have realized, after all Google is responsible for a larger part of the success of these publications.

But in Germany for example, Google News basicially just copypasted articles into their service, and monetizing it without involving the publishers. That doesn't qualify as transformative even under their own rules (see the YouTube TOS and copyright enforcement system).
1 comments
akolbe 1044 days ago
The trend with Google and other search engines over the past ten years has been for them to incorporate more and more content on their own pages. It's hard to remember that not so long ago Google search results pages were just lists of web pages bereft of any other content.

Today, if you Google for a song lyric, that lyric appears in Google. You get a tiny grey source link to Musixmatch or whatever but why would anyone bother to go there if you have the complete lyric right there on the page you are looking at?

More and more content real estate has appeared on search engines' pages. Answer boxes answering questions, again with a source link few people will use, and of course the large Knowledge Graph panel filled with Wikipedia content (written by volunteers and monetised by the world's richest tech companies).

The result is that it's tech companies and their platforms that make most of the money off content (YouTube is another example). They are the oil companies of today, and like the latter use all sorts of lobbying to make sure things are organised to their advantage.

For all the ingenuity and usability they offer, they behave at least in part like parasites. They should be forced to spread the wealth round a bit more.

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8note 1044 days ago
For lyrics, why should Musixmatch get the page view anyways? The musician/song writer owns the copyright
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awesomeMilou 1044 days ago
How does your argument relate to the one of the previous posters? Two rights don't make a wrong, nevermind that some of these sites do actually buy the rights to display the lyrics off of artists songs.
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