

If Bing Is Copying Google’s Search Results, Is It Breaking The Law?  - arman0
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-if-bing-is-copying-googles-search-results-is-it-breaking-the-law/

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jayzee
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.

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ry0ohki
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.

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DanLar75
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.

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jbri
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

