
Aren't AMP Caches committing copyright infringement? - superkuh
https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/amp-cache-copyright
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paxy
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/](https://www.ampproject.org/learn/overview/)).

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throwaway427
Yup, feeding AMP to consumers is a lot different than, say,
[https://outline.com/](https://outline.com/) which is straight up copyright
infringement.

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marktolson
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?

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sam0x17
Because this is disallowed by CORS/single origin policy

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realusername
CORS is just a security feature, it does not imply anything about copyright or
terms of use.

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icebraining
The DMCA ties the two by prohibiting users of copyrighted works from
circumventing technological protection measures. It could be argued that
bypassing CORS applies.

~~~
realusername
CORS isn't a technological protection like a DRM and isn't design as such,
it's purely a security measure, by default you don't even specify it. Browsers
are free to ignore them as they wish (but with increased security risks of
course).

~~~
jrockway
I agree. CORS is something my user agent does to protect me. It has nothing to
do with the upstream site; I could easily browse it with a user agent that
doesn't support CORS and nothing would break. CORS is just some annotations
that lets my user agent determine "hey these scripts might be up to something
shady". It is not a copy-protection mechanism by any means.

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

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

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pbhjpbhj
Copyright infringement is a tort though, so it's down to content owners to sue
Google if they feel damaged by this "caching".

I think countries added workarounds for computer caching, allowing transient
copies. But Google's "cache" or more of a short term archive, I'd guess they
called it "cache" to semantically bypass the issue of it being an infringing
copy.

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glitchc
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
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_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act)

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

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joegahona
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.

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

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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?

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Retric
They did check. Now, that’s not nessisarily enough but it is a defense.

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nwellnhof
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.

~~~
d2wa
The new EU copyright directive expressly excludes caching services from the
new publishers' rights (the "link tax").

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nvahalik
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?

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d2wa
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.

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40dslf
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?

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

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Causality1
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.

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int_19h
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.

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tones411
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
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?

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nabla9
No, because you have to do things that allow AMP caching. There is implicit
approval and even request.

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rplst8
I think we are just all over thinking this stuff. The purpose of the web is to
share things with other people.

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wtallis
> _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?

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nfoz
> 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.

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rplst8
Agree. Copyright and the patent system are leftover vestiges of monarchical
rule.

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devoply
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...

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d2wa
Actually, you'd have to solve the physics that is holding back latency on
mobile networks to compete with AMP.

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

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

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trkh0
Isn't web crawling? Or scanning whole books surfacing snippets and making them
searchable?

It's all fair use.

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

