Google Cache Ruled Fair Use

[mandy]

A district court in Nevada has ruled that the Google Cache is a fair use.

Blake Field, an author and attorney, brought the copyright infringement lawsuit against Google after the search engine automatically copied and cached a story he posted on his website. The district court found that Mr. Field “attempted to manufacture a claim for copyright infringement against Google in hopes of making money from Google’s standard [caching] practice.” Google responded that its Google Cache feature... does not violate copyright law.

The decision is replete with interesting findings that could have important consequences for the search engine industry, the Internet Archive, the Google Library Project lawsuit, RSS republishing, and a host of other online activities.

full article:  http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004344.php

[Nat]

Blake Field, an author and attorney, brought the copyright infringement lawsuit against Google after the search engine automatically copied and cached a story he posted on his website.

Hey, that sounds like the war I went through with Google about 4 or 5 years ago.  I started a website, put up a few pages of cemetery transcripts but after about a couple of weeks I decided to remove them and put them into a book and sell the book (since I was the one who transcribed the cemeteries went through all that time and expense, why not). 

So I removed the pages, made my book (did it all myself cerloxing them together so my expenses were very minimal), I sold around 80 or so copies and I was happy, until one day someone posted a message on a genealogy mailing list telling people that they didn't have to buy the book, just go to Google and they explained how to access my pages I had up but removed. I tried it, ended up viewing my cached pages?  I went ballistic.  Oh my, do I ever remember that.  After a lot of ugly emails back and forth, they removed my pages from their cache and shortly after they also put a link in their help files to make it easier to request cached pages to be removed from their system (I don't know if they still have that).

I thought that was rude and out of line that I create a page and they make a copy of it and keep it accessible without my permission?  Thank goodness I never took it to court - I would have lost.  I did learn a lesson - be very careful on what I post on the internet because after I removed it, I know it will still be there.

[Kristijntje]

A related case reaffirming that Google's caching of information constitutes fair use.  This one involves Usenet postings:

Google has won a legal action brought over a Usenet posting that the search giant archived and partially displayed in search results. Writer Gordon Roy Parker had claimed that this breached his copyright in the posting, a chapter of an e-book.

Parker, who represented himself in the suit, publishes online under the name “Snodgrass Publishing Group”. One of his publications was an e-book entitled “29 Reasons Not To Be A Nice Guy” and at some time he posted Reason 6 from this book onto a Usenet forum, the worldwide network of discussion groups.

In August 2004 he filed a lawsuit, alleging that when Google robots had automatically scanned and archived the posting in a cache, the search engine had breached his copyright in the material. Google had also directly infringed his copyright by including excerpts of the text in search results, he said...

full article: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/17/...ight_case/

[jezebel]

Google's 2-0 on the cache thing. Nobody's tested them on the time limit for caching pages?