Nicolas Suzor

What I can't get over is just how terrible a strategy this is when Google has been fighting so hard for so long to avoid being pushed into licensing deals for snippets, governments imposing link taxes, and coming soon to a country near you, brand new weird and made up AI training data dividends!

tl;dr: cry me a river, Google. This looks terrible, it goes against its own long-argued claims, it sucks Google even more towards a paid and licensed-search future, and makes it look even more anti-competitive. And it's just _not necessary_; it's just not that much of a threat.

If users are allowed to read books, copy facts for research, or run their own text mining, can a company build a massive digital library to enable that? Google was on the side of helping people get access to information for non-infringing uses. Maybe it still is, but the optics here are terrible.

And then the proxy problem: so many copyright cases are fought over whether a company can profitably help users do things they're entitled to. Can a library copy a chapter on my behalf? Can a web-pvr record tv on my behalf? If I'm allowed to access search results, can someone help me automate it?

Serp Api fills a niche that Google has REFUSED to service: programmattic access to search. That's really important for anyone who wants to, say, make sure their robots are well-grounded in current knowledge -- kindof a big deal, and you just can't afford to build that from scratch.

What makes this worse is just how tightly Google has fought to protect its scraping based business model by making it so hard for others to access its hoards of other people's data. It's just not a sympathetic plaintiff, and the suit is unlikely to get us useful, thoughtful precedent.

Regardless of the merits of the case, suing here makes Google look like it's pulling the ladder up after itself. It's also completely unnecessary; I'd be that someone would have sued Serp API or Perplexity or another target relatively soon. Google could have waited that out.

Google has historically been on the other side of this fight. It's the poster child for amazing innovation underpinned by making public information hard to lock up, not protecting facts with copyright, and not protecting 'non consumptive' uses of copyright material.

Best case, Google looks like a multi-billion dollar company that grew up before there were rules and developed a sweet little (massive) market advantage from its data. With robots.txt and a lot of technical control, it has pioneered an industry standard that protects that advantage.

Why we’re taking legal action against SerpApi’s unlawful scraping We filed a suit today against the scraping company SerpApi.

In dumb news of the day, Google has filed suit against SerpAPI: blog.google/technology/s...

I've said this before: Google is not the right plaintiff for these cases. There's some important issues to work out about robots.txt and proxy uses and scraping facts. But Google looks real bad here.

Join me and @noupside.bsky.social *IN FIVE MINUTES* to talk about what the European Commission's decision means for X's pocket book, Europe's ongoing access to X, JD Vance's tweets, and whether this decision really is about censoring American tech companies.

Tomorrow 10am AEST (midnight Brussels) is our #digitallaw25 symposium, 2nd of its kin. Packed programme, exceptional abstracts & slides! With @mariaosullivan.bsky.social @nicsuzor.bsky.social hosted at the Law Chambers @monashuniversity.bsky.social with Deakin Law. Any Oz tech law profs can follow

BREAKING
@knightcolumbia.org just won their case against Trump admin’s policy arresting/deporting noncitizen stud. & fac. participating in pro-Palestinian activism

This is a threat mailed to chambers of the 84yo Reagan appointed judge. He started the opinion with it and this is how he ended.

1/2

OpenAI employees are very excited about how well their new AI tool can create fake videos of people doing crimes and have definitely thought through all the implications of this

A year ago at #TrustCon, I ran around like a maniac showing people something on my laptop. We'd just gotten CoPE - our policy interpretation model - working. It felt like a huge achievement, validating our ideas about LLM-powered labeling. 🧵 1/7

Great panel yesterday on 'Governing automated decision-making for positive social services' with @kimweatherall.bsky.social , Samantha Floreani, Jake Goldenfein, and Kath Albury, organised and chaired by Christine Parker at @admscentre.org.au . The highlights of the conversation (in thread):

The PlatGov Conference is back! What a joy! I have learned so much from this research community. Join us this year 👇 @robyncaplan.bsky.social @gorwa.ca @ameliehldt.bsky.social @naomiappelman.bsky.social @deeliu97.bsky.social

I am getting excited! 3 weeks to go until our AoIR Symposium 2025 in Bremen will kick-off! The line-up of plenary speakers is wonderful, and the program so promising. If you are able to join in early June, don't miss to register for the few remaining seats. platform-governance.org/aoir-flashpo...

why did nobody tell me python 3.10 introduced a match/case syntax? WHAT ELSE HAVE I BEEN MISSING?

Very happy to see this work come out from the amazing @klonick.bsky.social and team — measuring relationship between outrage and the spread of false information

From the most excellent Tegan Cohen: www.uottawa.ca/en/news-all/...

omg i did this last week and woke up at 1pm, i kid you not.

I feel so proud to announce that my first book - The Kids Are Online: Confronting the Myths and Realities of Young Digital Life - will be published in March 2025, by @ucpress.bsky.social 🫶🏼

🚨 #DiscoveryProjects #DP25 announcement:

❗️Outcomes announced publicly for Discovery Projects 2025❗️

See ARC's RMS for list ➡️ rms.arc.gov.au/RMS/Report/D...

/bot

Ok, I'm here, hello world!