Blogs, Search Engines and CC Licences

I believe that it’s ok with text, because the search results only display either a description of the site or a small percentage or the available text. Images, on the other hand, are a different story. Even if the images are under a copyright the can be illegally harvested by search engines, as detailed in this blog post: https://www.tamba2.org.uk/T2/archives/2005/03/27/more-on-google/

LOL !
And the caching will display an entire page …..

No results to look at ? No Search Engine …

The author’s copyright on the blog will only cover the work itself, not links to the work. Even if the search engine adds short excerpts to the search results, like Google does, it’s likely that those are protected by fair use. In a similar case, the Ninth circuit ruled that it was indeed fair use for a search engine to display thumbnails of copyrighted images in its search results. Therefore, it’s probably unnecessary for the search engine to obtain a license to use the excerpts.

The stickier problem, in my mind, is the Google cache. Google effectively redistributes a copy of your page when someone accesses the cached version.

Yahoo cache too, maybe others.

The point is – the way I see it – that a License is effectively your “Blog EULA” and should be respected. So is that the case ?

The Creative Commons licenses grant viewers and consumers additional expanded rights to use the protected works under certain specified circumstances. The licenses do not restrict rights under the existing copyright law. If a consumer has a fair use right to use excerpts of the protected work under existing law, the license does nothing–and in fact, can’t do anything–to remove those preexisting rights.

Google doesn’t seem to put ads on the cache pages (ex), nor does Yahoo! The ads are on the search pages. So, despite brainwidth being correct IMO, the license doesn’t really come in to play.

I’m not sure that’s exactly true. The test for commercial use does not demand that ads be placed directly on the reproduction of the protected work. Simply republishing the work in a commercial context, as Google clearly is, may be enough to violate the non-commercial restrictions of certain CC licenses.

If you don’t want to be on Google, I believe they respect robots.txt instructions, though this would seem to be a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face.

It’s not about Google.
It’s about any search engine.

I’m not sure I understand the objection to a search engine indexing your content. It’s kind of interesting as a copyright thought problem, but what exactly is the objection?

I’m not objecting, I’m just raising a point I was not sure on.

If I take the feeds from the posters to this thread, and I display them on my site, with ads would you mind ?
If you would, then you have to mind about SE’s
If you do not, then why should I not take your feed ?

Aggregators such as Bloglines do this, and while it may be with the owners consent, it may also be done without positive assent. If licenses are there ostensibly to protect content and we say our content cannot be used commercially, then are not these services doing just that ? And if so, does that not make a nonsense of the licenses ?

My own views matter not and to be honest I have no firm view – that’s why I said it’s a genuine question and why a debate may or may not be useful. I did not mention Google.

Funny you mention this… I had a post on the topic three months ago:

https://www.semiologic.com/2005/03/19/is-the-search-engine-business-viable/

Sorry. Same goes for any search engine. I was specifically thinking of Google and Yahoo because they both have the cache feature. The excerpts that they provide in their normal search results are almost certainly “fair use” in a US context. I don’t know, but I assume many other countries have something similar to fair use. The caches are probably beyond fair use But in any case, with any major search engine, it would still seem to be cutting off your nose to spite your face to stop them using your content and pointing potential readers to you in the process. (Of course, I’m assuming that you want people to find your blog.)

Tomhanna – yes, to a point.
If what you are saying is that it’s basically okay for SE’s to do this because they send traffic our way – that it’s an acceptable trade-off – then it’s fine if I do that too ?

What I’m saying is that if we have chosen a non-commerical license, then that has to be respected as an absolute, regardless of whether it’s a huge media company using your content.
If a spammer used exactly the same content in exactly the same way, would people cry “Foul !” and use the license against the host ? If you would, then you have to use it against the SE’s.

It’s either a license or ‘just another graphic’.

Well, that is what I’m saying, though I guess it’s more a matter of questioning why you would choose that license. I suppose what I’m actually saying is that, in most cases, the “attribution – share alike” is probably a better license than the “noncommercial” if you are interested in generating readership for your work. Of course that means you are opening up the possibility that someone will use your work to help make a buck. Personally if someone makes a little money off my work I’d be a) surprised and b) thrilled.