A court has ruled that Google's cacheing and displaying of millions of web-pages is legal. Google Cache is the service that offers to show you stored versions of the web-pages that turn up in the results for your Google searches. Until recently, no court had ruled on the legality of this, and it was unclear whether this would qualify as a "fair use." If not, Google and a number of other cacheing services (particularly the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine) would have been in deep trouble.
A district court in Nevada brought down the ruling yesterday, deciding that Google was not breaking the law because it honors the "robots.txt" and "nocache" headers, because it automatically caches without human intervention, because cacheing is a fair use, and because this activity falls into a copyright exemption called a "safe harbor."
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, which allows Google users to link to an archival copy of websites indexed by Google, does not violate copyright law.
(Thanks, Fred!)
