Google Search crawls, copies, stores in its database, and internally distributes content from all over the web, violating copyright laws. It also displays a significant part of the copied text to Google visitors. Most of the copied content, from tiny blog posts to novels and dissertations, are literary works protected by copyright.
In essence, Google acts as a distributor (or the distributor) of almost all literary works on the web. It operates like brick-and-mortar bookstores did before the Internet. Customers visited bookstores, listened to the staff’s recommendations, were guided to the shelves where those books were located, and could look inside the books' contents before buying. This is precisely what Google does now. Google makes it known that it carries substantially all literary works on the web. To access the content of interest, Google site visitors enter keywords, and Google provides links to articles and snippets from them, allowing visitors to look inside. The main difference is that bookstores buy books from publishers, while Google copies copyrighted content without permission or compensation to the publisher or author.
Google makes money by showing its visitors ads, which are placed before the works for which the visitor searches. Additionally, Google shows its content (e.g., YouTube). The original content owner loses customers when visitors choose one of Google’s prominent ads or links.
To make matters worse, Google is not neutral. It promotes its political allies and demotes its adversaries. A demoted content owner or publisher might get five times fewer clicks from Google search than a comparable Google-friendly competitor, from which Google derives the same financial benefit. The demoted content owner loses business because Google visitors know its content is inside the Google index and believe it has not been shown because it is less relevant to their search or of a lower quality.
Google violates at least four of five exclusive privileges granted by copyright law to authors of literary works and has no fair use defense. This is an unprecedented intellectual property theft.
Google’s Connection to Democrats and the Obama/Biden Administration
Google was founded in 1998 and established relationships with the Democratic Party as early as 2001, when it hired Vice President Al Gore as its senior advisor. Al Gore had not left politics but started mixing politics and business. He became a worldwide leader in climate alarmism. In 2006, he convinced Google to abandon its policy of search neutrality, probably in favor of climate alarmism and other Democrat agendas. Google’s political donations are also one-sided toward the Democrats.
Google has been a powerful electoral ally of the Democratic Party since 2006 and became entangled with the Obama administration immediately when it came to power. Google aided the Democrats, and the Democrats aided Google. One might say there was also an ideological alignment between them. Obamanet (net neutrality) was imposed by a collaboration of Google and the neo-Marxist group Free Press. So, the Obama administration ignored that Google was stealing literary works, including news, from all over the web. In 2013, the FTC closed its anti-trust investigation into Google after Google made some symbolic concessions. An example of such concessions was a letter from Google to the FTC, promising to allow some IP owners to opt out of the public display (but not copying, making derivative works, and distributing within Google) of their content:
“Exercise of this option [opt out] will not (1) prevent content from the website from appearing in conventional search results on the google.com search results page, or (2) be used as a signal in determining conventional search results on the google.com search results page. Beyond these specific commitments, nothing described above will impact Google’s ability to (i) display content that it has sourced or derived independently even if it is the same as or overlaps with content from the opting-out web site, or (ii) otherwise crawl, organize, index and display information from the Internet or innovate in search.”
Following this insolent letter, the FTC closed its investigation of Google’s monopoly abuse, effectively accepting and endorsing Google’s massive copyright infringement. This strengthened Google’s position against copyright owners of literary works. Since 2017, Google and the Democrats have been open about Google’s role as a potent weapon against President Trump. Thus, the Democrats’ unconditional support of Google’s misconduct is unsurprising.
Consequences: Defunding of News and Other Literary Works
No publisher or distributor can survive when a massive competitor takes their content without paying for it and then distributes it. The influence of Google’s theft is most apparent in the newspapers' ad revenues, which fell from $49 billion in 2005 to $22 billion in 2014 (1, 2). During this same time, Google’s domestic ads revenues increased from $4 billion to $28 billion. In other words, 90% of ads revenue lost by newspapers went to Google.
Rupert Murdoch was one of the few to decry the situation and attempt to do something about it in 2009. Of course, he did not succeed under the Obama-Biden administration. The rest of the news media resorted to receiving crumbs from Google, hidden subsidies from governments (not only American), and cost cutting – laying off journalists and replacing them with activists. The media also shifted further to the left to align with Google and the Obama-Biden administration. The Fake News Media was born. Hidden government subsidies include Politico Pro “subscriptions” and Associated Press and Reuters “projects”. USAGM is no less a culprit than USAID.
The old publishing business model sustained news media and supported a diverse ecosystem, including all genres and political persuasions. This ecosystem included librarians, wholesale distributors, bookstore owners, critics, and other professionals. This model supported civil society with all of its diversity of thought. For example, professional societies used to publish magazines and included subscriptions to their magazines as one of the essential benefits of membership. Google’s piracy destroyed all of this.
A reader might ask why publishers wouldn’t deliver their content directly to their readers by partnering with ISPs and bypassing Google crawlers. Unfortunately, this exact approach was prohibited by Obamanet (net neutrality). This is just one of how Obamanet overturned traditional norms on the Internet. Although the FCC repealed the federal Obamanet under Trump-45, Obamanet was reinstated by the state laws of California, New York, and other 20+ blue states.
Legal
The deference to Google’s business model is based on its connections to the Obama/Biden administrations, not on the legal merits of its conduct. Section 106 of the Copyright Act grants literary works authors and other copyright owners the following exclusive rights in their works:
(1) To make copies of the work
(2) To make derivative works
(3) To distribute the work to the public
(4) To perform the work publicly
(5) To display the work publicly
Google violates this exclusivity when it 1) copies pages from individual websites, 2) makes derivative works by a) placing them in a database and b) creating its index comprising of short sentences from each work, 3) distributes copies from its database to thousands of Google employees and contractors and, arguably, to billions of its users, 5) displays snippets of each work, specially selected to capture visitor’s interest and essence of each work.
Of note, Google does not respect opt-out requests for its actions described in numbers (1) – (3).
Copyright law has a fair use exception, but substituting or eliminating the market for someone’s work is never fair use. It is even harder to imagine “fair use” when a trillion-dollar corporation takes an individual author's work without compensation.
A thin string of legal cases in the 9th, 2nd, and 3rd circuits is believed to favor Google. These cases cover only some aspects of some infringing actions, usually public display, and are based on technical mistakes and misrepresentations by Google.
On the other hand, in Associated Press v. Meltwater (2013, SDNY), the court essentially ruled against Google’s business model, even as it explicitly assumed that it is legal.
Most things said about Google apply to Microsoft and its Bing search, except that the latter cozied up to the Obama-Biden administration later than Google, so it received a smaller portion of the free pie.
Copyright for literary works should be distinguished from copyright for audiovisual works, aggressively defended by MPAA and RIAA and giving all copyright a bad name.
Conclusion
There is an intuitive understanding that Big Tech's power is wrongful, but it lacks the technical knowledge to pinpoint where is the catch and formulate legal claims. Google is built upon criminal copyright infringement.
Copyright of literary works is one of the few federal government functions enshrined in the Constitution. It is to be protected by the federal government as per Article I, Section 8, and the laws passed by Congress based on it. "… the Framers intended copyright itself to be the engine of free expression" - Harper & Row, Supreme Court. The Obama-Biden administration shredded copyright laws and the First Amendment to aid Google and its other Big Tech allies.
