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.