Aren't AMP Caches committing copyright infringement?

https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/amp-cache-copyright

by superkuh • 7 years ago

199 95 7 years ago

Operyl• 7 years ago

Tl;dr: probably not. But we're not lawyers, and Google/Bing has enough to be confident that it isn't.

paxy• 7 years ago

Whether or not it is "technically" copyright infringement, it is going to be impossible for a publisher to argue that in court considering they themselves have to publish an AMP-compatible version of their page in the first place, and caching is sold as a core feature of AMP (https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/).

throwaway427• 7 years ago

Yup, feeding AMP to consumers is a lot different than, say, https://outline.com/ which is straight up copyright infringement.

marktolson• 7 years ago

What if outline.com simply did a GET request on the source from the browser, stripped out paywalls and ads and served the content from the source server. Is that still copyright infringement?

lugg2• 7 years ago

If that is copyright infringement then so is Google Chrome.

Outline is a browser in a browser.

If it were accessing unauthorised content in a shady way I would say they have a leg to stand on, but serving up content to Google different from what it serves to the user is already borderline illegal for a variety of reasons. (It's a misrepresentation) I don't think anyone is wanting to go down that road.

Remember with the law intent is usually what matters most.

The technical stance that outline is serving up content that the user requests from another site is by design not redistribution.

The funny part is that the argument that allows this is the same stupid argument that permits copyright to exist in a world where everytime you open or read a file you are technically copying it.

gpm3• 7 years ago

Does anyone actually know who is running outline.com? Are they definitely infringing on copyrights or is that just a popular assumption?

I've been wondering for awhile, given how successful it is at navigating paywalls, if it might actually be run by the newspapers themselves as a way of attracting potential customers. Giving them content to keep them interested while guilting them into paying.

nvahalik• 7 years ago

But don’t you have to opt-in to AMP to begin with? Wouldn’t there be some sort of implicit permission in providing the AMP formatted content to begin with?

0815test• 7 years ago

Do you have to opt-in to AMP e-mail? Keep in mind that the sender then holds the copyright. For that matter, can your web hosting platform opt-in to AMP without your express consent?

underwater• 7 years ago

You can deploy and AMP page, and set a meta header that announces it exists. This is not an explicit opting in to Google's AMP cache though. That's what the author means by implicit license.

pbhjpbhj5• 7 years ago

You opt in to the internet by making content available on it too, so are we rolling back to the free copying of last millennium?

d2wa6• 7 years ago

As discussed in the article, some content management systems (like hosted WordPress.com instances) produce AMP variants of each published page. The author/rightsholder may not be aware of this and thus has neither expressly or implicitly agreed to anything of the sort.

40dslf• 7 years ago

Then the author should pay attention.

If wordpress by default said on the footer "content licensed under CC", how would it be my fault if I reuse the content, just because the author didn't bother to change that?

glitchc2• 7 years ago

Any communications channel transmitting data is committing copyright infringement. It’s not like the source bit is deleted once received at the destination. That’s how the internet works.

jforman• 7 years ago

Copyright law is more complicated than that, but regardless OCILLA drastically reduced copyright liability for the pipes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_...

glitchc2• 7 years ago

I was just taking the argument to its logically absurd conclusion. Of course, copyright law is more complicated than that.

konschubert• 7 years ago

I think this is looking at things from the the perspective of an enginneer, not a lawyer.

https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

rplst82• 7 years ago

I think we are just all over thinking this stuff. The purpose of the web is to share things with other people.

908087• 7 years ago

I prefer to share things with other people without a corporation injecting itself into the middle of that transaction for the purposes of surveillance and ad revenue.

adtac• 7 years ago

Doesn't matter, still sharing. Add a robots.txt if you explicitly want to disable access to Google's crawler.

wtallis• 7 years ago

The purpose of the web is to share things with other people.

How does that in any way remove the need for a sound legal framework defining the limits of IP rights for this use case? Do you think everything put on the web should be considered public domain?

nfoz• 7 years ago

Do you think everything put on the web should be considered public domain?

In my personal opinion -- Emphatic yes. Copyright law is tyrannical and should be abolished.

If you don't want to serve the content then don't serve the content.

njharman• 7 years ago

Summer child, the web is to extract money from consumers for benefit of property owners. If it was about sharing copyright law would not apply.

shereadsthenews• 7 years ago

Google also caches and serves everything else its robot finds, so if this was a problem it was already a problem long before AMP.

kdeenanauth• 7 years ago

Caching can be disabled https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/79812?hl=en

But per the wording "noarchive - Prevents Google from showing the Cached link for a page" - and it seems likes it is technically just avoiding showing the cached link.

comboy• 7 years ago

But we are in the f up territory. Does EU law says anything about meta tags? If not, then unless explicitly allowed you can't copy it.

On so many levels.

NullPrefix• 7 years ago

I'm pretty sure you can disable AMP for your site too.

LoSboccacc• 7 years ago

that's not really a valid defense. the default state is copyrighted unless otherwise stated, this assumes the contrary.

tones411• 7 years ago

I wondered the same about text in search results. My guess is that web page authors would rather let it happen than lose out on the traffic.

koolba• 7 years ago

This is exactly the type of thing that “fair use” is supposed to cover. It gets blurrier though when you get into fuller media like images and video. Does a thumbnail count? How about a 10-second clip? How about a speech-to-text transcript?

joegahona2• 7 years ago

As others have said, the publishers opt in to it... but I wondert whether litigious photographers could argue that their contracts never indicated their photos could exist anywhere but on the specific domain in the contract.

taytus• 7 years ago

In any case, that wouldn’t be google’s fault.

pbhjpbhj5• 7 years ago

Depends. If Google seek permission from the page owner and the owner warrants the fact that photos are licensed for AMP use, then it's all good.

If Google don't bother, just assuming they have the rights, then they're infringers. In copyright law the distributor is usually down for the largest punishment, that would be Google.

"I didn't bother to check if it was an infringement for me to distribute the work" doesn't seem like it would negate a claim of tortuous infringement?

d2wa6• 7 years ago

[...] contracts never indicated their photos could exist anywhere but on the specific domain in the contract

I doubt many contracts are written for specific domain names. I expect most contracts allow for a publisher to use it in their publications without specifying exactly whether that publication is a website, magazine, publisher branded app, or an Apple News article.

joegahona2• 7 years ago

You would think so, but with publications on the ropes, it gets sliced and diced more than you might think. Photo rights are cheaper to obtain by the publication if they limit the platforms (and the time frame of rights, and a bunch of other factors), and savvy photographers will call out pubs on that.

devoply2• 7 years ago

Best way to kill AMP is to increase bandwidth limits on mobile internet. That's the only justifiable reason for this monstrosity to exist. I can't wait to see AMP die until then I will bide my time...

d2wa6• 7 years ago

Actually, you'd have to solve the physics that is holding back latency on mobile networks to compete with AMP.

devoply2• 7 years ago

I don't experience much noticeable latency on 4g. 5g is supposed to fix that with 1ms latency.

zlynx• 7 years ago

AMP is mostly a response to sites that want to load 20 MB video and endless popups timed to appear just when you want to click on "Next".

Build reasonable web sites and don't use AMP.

I won't even use mobile web without Firefox and Ublock anymore. The difference between that and stock Chrome is ridiculous. Browsing with Chrome results in about 5x the data usage.

Causality1• 7 years ago

One thing I've never seen addressed is the way AMP hijacks android Chrome behavior. It hides and then locks out the address/menu bar until the user scrolls all the way to the top of the page and then drags down again. If any other website is allowed to do this I haven't seen it and would love a way to disable it.

gnicholas• 7 years ago

It does a similar thing on iOS and is super annoying. I run into it on Firefox Focus (where I google most often), but presumably it affects other browsers as well.

int_19h• 7 years ago

This one thing is the single biggest reason why I avoid AMP like plague. It's like this thing is designed with someone who does not know what tabbed browsing is in mind.

kretor• 7 years ago

Problem doesn't occur for me. Sounds like a bug

jeffdavis• 7 years ago

Seems like an overly-technical interpretation of "copying". But then again, EULAs were based on a similar principle.

trkh0• 7 years ago

Isn't web crawling? Or scanning whole books surfacing snippets and making them searchable?

It's all fair use.

pbhjpbhj5• 7 years ago

And what about in the rest of the World outside USA. We don't have Fair Use in the UK for example.

nabla9• 7 years ago

No, because you have to do things that allow AMP caching. There is implicit approval and even request.

nwellnhof• 7 years ago

But the way Google uses AMP goes way beyond caching, at least in the way news articles are presented. Do I really give anyone an implied license to republish AMP content on their own properties as soon as I put some AMP pages online? There might be some limited control by using robots.txt but that's rather coarse-grained.

My main irk with AMP is that it's mostly an all-or-nothing solution. I'd love to publish AMP pages without allowing anyone to republish my content. The way Google implements AMP also seems like a huge antitrust issue given their near-monopoly in search. I wouldn't be surprised if one of the next EU fines will be over AMP.

d2wa6• 7 years ago

The new EU copyright directive expressly excludes caching services from the new publishers' rights (the "link tax").

Aren't AMP Caches committing copyright infringement?

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