hutcheson - 10:06 pm on Jan 8, 2003 (gmt 0)

>>Can a movie critic give good reviews to a film, find out the producer holds contrary political views, then turn around and pan the movie?

Well, the movie PR industry works differently. A PC movie critic is expected to know the producer's political views before writing the first review. So your question is sort of like "Can a National Review editor publish an article one week, and then go back and check the spelling of the main words and republish if they were misspelled?" -- It's part of the basic research.

Google recalculates the PR each month. Think of it more as Clintonian democracy in action, and ask instead, "Can a politician claim to give a factual description of an event one month, poll to find out the electorate holds different views, and express a contradictory set of proclaimed facts about the same event the next month?"

Think of Google as the website-review version of Clinton: it doesn't HAVE its own personal view, it just runs the polls to see what comes up. But Clinton doesn't therefore lose his copyright to his own words (or even the words his copywriter wrote for hire for him).

Google's poll results, since they do respresent an enormous amount of data collection, aggregation, and processing (involving proprietary and probably patented techniques extending far beyond the borderline test cases involving phone directories), are surely copyrightable.