uastronomer
@uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za
Urban Astronomer Podcaster
Director at Monoceros Digital Consulting
AWS gun for hire, Linux/Unix consultant
He/him
Sometimes I write articles for universetoday.com
Trying to expand Monoceros to provide a range of Mastodon services (Feel free to let me know of any you might want!)
Lapsed #astronomer, exhausted #dad, small business owner, reader of books, player of #games, wrestler of #python, #admin of systems.
- Comment on 5 weeks ago:
@toon @atomicpoet @fediversenews
So first up, I'm not an IP lawyer, or any other kind of lawyer, so I can only talk about how big online copyright cases have played out, from what was reported in the media, but I reckon that indexing is entirely legal.
Search engines have been indexing the content of every website they can find for over 30 years. This includes stuff that the owners really didn't want indexed. There have been many well-publicized cases of Google and friends indexing stuff that should have been protected but that wasn't, including private medical records, plaintext password databases, classified government documents, internal company documents, and more. A popular hacking technique is to simply use google to search for filenames that might contain sensitive data (maybe something like "Patient admissions filetype:xlsx")
As far as I know, no search engine has ever been found guilty of breaking the law by doing this, and nobody has ever successfully sued.Closest I can think of to real legal problems for indexers was when Google started bulk-scanning copyrighted books, and making them available in books.google.com
That was a long time ago so I don't remember much of the reporting, but based on how that website works now, I suspect that the only copyright issue that stuck was "You can't just give copies away", The index remains, and you can read excerpts of books, but not the whole text.