Comment by patio11
15 years ago
Google is at least a little naughty. Remember, at the dawn of the Internet, there was quite a bit of ambiguity with regards to IP rights. Many newspapers sent out Cease and Desists just for deep-linking to their articles. There was still quite a bit of presumption about how much control of use copyright gave you.
Google walks into this minefield and says "You know, we're going to crawl and cache everything, then exploit the data in it for our own selfish commercial purposes." And it worked!
I think you give too much credence to this "ambiguity".The idea that copyright could forbid deep linking was always absurd.
Also, don't forget about Google Books.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Book_Search_Settlement_A...
Yeah, Google and the other 20 search companies at the time. I don't think this became an issue before search became reasonably good, when they didn't have a choice but follow through.
I also think Google broke and still breaks rules, just your example is not very good. Interesting that this reply of yours is upvoted over paul, pg and tlb in this thread.