Yes, publishers should start sending takedown notices to Google for their content. However, most people don't do this because the result is to be completely dropped from Google.

Facts are not copyrightable, even if you worked very hard to find the fact. Copyright generally applies to the complexity of the result, not the effort that went into getting the result.

But the expression of the fact is copyrightable and Google is taking verbatim excerpts from websites and posting them on their site.

So if you enable this, do you want to be punished and fined every time you quote a sentence from a movie or book somewhere?

Google helps you by actually giving you information you search without having to go through a SEOd webpage feeding tracking advertisers. You want to make copyright even more abusive and restrictive for what? Feeding scummy websites that exist to collect clicks for returning simple facts? We're not talking Wikipedia type content here.

There is a concept of fair use, which is both frustratingly and wisely vaguely defined.

The relevant part of the doctrine is: >The fourth factor measures the effect that the allegedly infringing use has had on the copyright owner's ability to exploit his original work. The court not only investigates whether the defendant's specific use of the work has significantly harmed the copyright owner's market, but also whether such uses in general, if widespread, would harm the potential market of the original. The burden of proof here rests on the copyright owner, who must demonstrate the impact of the infringement on commercial use of the work. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

Whether a website is scummy or not does not come into play. And frankly the stuff I'm seeing showing up in snippets in google search are very much wikipedia-type content (often exactly wikipedia-type content). And we're not talking snippets that provide context on the search result to enable determining whether this is the content that one is looking for, we're talking significant pieces of the content, often reformatted and presented in such a way that not clicking on the site is precisely the objective of the presentation.

The problem is that you need to fight for that fair use in the court with huge amounts of money.

When was the last time you've seen an individual or small company win a fair use case against YouTubes abusive algorithm? Because the created content gets taken down constantly even if its fair use. The algorithm doesn't care... and neither do giant copyright holding corporations that issue automated frivolous takedowns.

> So if you enable this, do you want to be punished and fined every time you quote a sentence from a movie or book somewhere?

If I was the 800 pound search engine throwing my weight around to quote a sentence from a movie or book, then yes, maybe I should be fined--or at least required to offer compensation.

I think there's a difference between a company with billions in revenue doing it versus "you".

> Google helps you by actually giving you information you search without having to go through a SEOd webpage feeding tracking advertisers.

You say this as if Google.com itself isn't the ultimate tracked web property for an advertising giant.

> If I was the 800 pound search engine throwing my weight around to quote a sentence from a movie or book, then yes, maybe I should be fined--or at least required to offer compensation.

Except that the (current American) law doesn't work that way - the 800 pound gorillas use their billions to pay lawyers to abuse small creators and outlets based on such creative interpretations of copyright laws. The gorillas are capable of fighting a copyright battle at court over details while they can just abuse the same right into some individuals bankrupcy.

Giving them even more power over your expression is incredibly harmful to society.

> do you want to be punished and fined every time you quote a sentence from a movie or book somewhere?

You can't see how me quoting a line from a movie and Google reproducing tracts of content verbatim might be of different type?

Do you really, REALLY want to make facts copyrightable and owned by corporations? Plain information? Weaponized, that would destroy Wikipedia, blogs and tutorials.

Let's not make copyright even more cancerous as it already is.

That's not what I'm saying at all. When you write about a fact, you have copyright to the way that you assembled words to communicate that fact. When Google is taking snippets from other website and presenting it as their own content in a way that discourages visiting the sites where Google got that content, while displaying their own ads and services, they are effectively plagiarizing and committing acts that are anticompetitive and possibly not fair use. If a site wants to prevent Google from using their content for free to keep people off of their site, they should have the right to do so.

I'm about as far from a copyright shill as you can get without being an information anarchist. I think the copyright system in the United States needs to be completely overhauled and should stop giving corporations indefinite monopolies over ideas. But this is a case where the existence of copyright could be a good thing for the little guy to resist abuse from Big Data.

I find search engines useful, there's a tradeoff though. Copyright is what it is and the information is either copyrighted and should be respected or the law needs to change. Try scraping Google and see how far you get as a business.