Is this fair use?

May 16, 2010 11:13 PM

Does Google enter into agreements with content providers to show aggregated data on their restaurant information pages?

If you do a Google search for 'restaurants city name' and then click on the reviews link next to each restaurant name, you get to a restaurant information page like this (chosen at random).

This is different from their regular search results where they just show snippets of the websites. Here they are intelligently reading the reviews and different features and presenting them to the user in one place.

Can they show this information from various sites just because they link to the source of their data, or do they need to get prior approval from the review sites they're showing the data from?

You can see the same thing on many local country Google sites, I'd appreciate answers for any countries.

posted by Gomez_in_the_South to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

Can they show this information from various sites just because they link to the source of their data, or do they need to get prior approval from the review sites they're showing the data from?

Well, it's no different then the excerpts you'd see doing a regular Google search, just more specific because it's looking for a very specific type of information. Presumably it's opt-out just like everything else. As search technology improves the kind of excerpting you see will get better and better.
posted by delmoi at 11:23 PM on May 16, 2010

Best answer: Reviews providers can mark up their content to enable Google's Rich Snippets. The site can tag their data according to the spec in one of a couple of different formats. Google can then aggregate the data and display it in one place as you've noticed. It's opt-in, of sorts, because sites need to mark up their content with the reviews microformat for it to work.

Google also has rich snippet support for a few other types of data, like people and recipes and events.
posted by zachlipton at 11:44 PM on May 16, 2010

I would think the reviews sites would be okay with this, since it probably gets them extra page views. If I see a restaurant has more reviews than Google is showing, I'll usually click through to the site.

I suppose that some review sites could be unhappy, much how they were upset that Google News was pulling news articles from various sources. In that case, the review sites could request an opt-out feature or even sue. Google News now offers opt-out, briefly paid for AP articles, and cannot display snippets from Belgian article sources by court order.
posted by IndigoRain at 1:17 AM on May 17, 2010

Fair use is an affirmative defense against a claim of copyright infringement. If there's no claim of copyright infringement, there's no fair use (because there doesn't need to be).

This might seem a bit pedantic, but the mere presence of copyrighted data in two places doesn't guarantee infringement. As others have mentioned, there's the option that this is opt-in. It could also be permitted explicitly or implicitly by the content providers.
posted by toomuchpete at 6:06 AM on May 17, 2010

Response by poster: Thanks for the answers so far.

Let me provide some more context for my question. I've been working on a similar project, where we aggregate data of this sort from various review websites. This aggregated information is then presented to our users, with relevant links back to the source data.

I am trying to decide is if it is necessary to obtain permission from the different sources to use their data in this way. I understand that 'someone else is doing it' is not a legal defense, so I am interested to learn more about Google's position.

Opinions on both the legality and ethics of this are welcome (YANML etc) .
posted by Gomez_in_the_South at 7:07 AM on May 17, 2010