Alternate headline:
"Google Saves Millions of Hours of Time by Providing Answers Directly"
Is this a valid analogy?:
Imagine you had a brilliant friend who read all the books in a library and answered any question you asked her. Would you say this friend is stealing profit from book publishers?
If my friend was a billion-dollar company that sells ads, then yes I would. Google is taking the intellectual property of other content producers and monetizing it directly.
This impoverishes the rest of the internet and redistributes money from a diverse field of competitors to a single quasi-monopolistic company. Which is bad for the internet as an ecosystem long term.
Countries like France and the European Union with the copyright directive last year luckily strengthened the property rights of news organisations and Google had to strip snippets out of their results or strike a revenue-sharing agreement with the companies in question.
It is utterly absurd to me that a search engine is supposed to be able to capitalise on the original content of others for free.In fair use doctrine, it is generally considered that a service crosses the line between fair use and piracy if it functions as a substitute. This is exactly what Google is doing.
Is this a valid analogy?: Imagine you had a brilliant friend who read all the books in a library and answered any question you asked her. Would you say this friend is stealing profit from book publishers?