If Bing Is Copying Google’s Search Results, Is It Breaking The Law?

http://paidcontent.org/article/419-if-bing-is-copying-googles-search-results-is-it-breaking-the-law/

by arman0 • 15 years ago

5 4 15 years ago

jayzee• 15 years ago

I doubt it since Google is fighting this battle in public instead of getting its lawyers involved.

On the other hand: An interesting and possibly relevant legal issue here is how WestLaw's star pagination system was copied by LexisNexis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westlaw#Legal_disputes)

It would seem that Google's ranking would be similar to WestLaws pagination system and might be protected by copyright.

ry0ohki• 15 years ago

I don't think ordering of results could be considered copyright, that's more like a method (since Bing presumably still crawls the sites and builds it's own index, with perhaps Google as a ranking factor).

Real world consumer product companies copy what the competition is doing every day (it would be like US Airways putting it's interior designers on a Southwest plane), as long as Microsoft isn't using internal Google spies to steal code or something.

DanLar75• 15 years ago

How in the world would they be? Scraping web-content is pretty much Google's entire business model. Is 'slightly' hypocritical for them to even speak out on this in my opinion.

jbri• 15 years ago

Google doesn't represent that content as their own, instead they link to the original source.

I don't think anyone would be complaining if searching on Bing just redirected to google.com/?q=whatever_you_searched_for

If Bing Is Copying Google’s Search Results, Is It Breaking The Law?

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