Re: Neat summary of Google strategy

joseph harris <[email protected]> wrote:

> From: "Bill Janssen"
> > Mary E Tyler <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >> Google isn't copying your content. They are
> >> linking to content, aggregating those links.
> >
> > Sure they're copying (as I'm sure you know).  That's how 
> > they compute
> > their ranks and index your pages.  I think no one's called 
> > them on it,
> > though, because the Web is sort of built that way --  
> > there's a tacit
> > agreement (which some would like to abrogate) that if you 
> > publish it on
> > a Web page, people are allowed to make copies for 
> > non-commercial
> > personal use.  You pretty much have to, to read it.
> >
> > Bill
> 
> Bill makes a very important point. Technically a file is 
> copied at every point of its journey - usually in packets, 
> still, I believe - and is put together as a coherent copy on 
> the recipient' hard drive. This causes a terminological 
> confusion over the nature of what a copy is in copyright.
> 
> However I have never been convinced that there is any 
> confusion in anyone's mind that treating a copy of that sort 
> as a source document (for their further use as though one 
> has ownership rights) is *not* a moral act. They may receive 
> and use - just as a print buyer may - but they have no 
> rights to distribute that file, whether free or not.

I won't comment on the morality of it all, but I believe that copyright
law controls whether or not they have the right to make copies of the
original.  That the copyright owner has implicitly allowed them to make
those copies -- in fact, has encouraged people to make copies, by the
act of putting the original on a Web server -- seems to me to
substantially weaken any prosecution of folks who have done what the
copyright holder encouraged them to do, and made copies.  But, IANAL --
just a sometime juror.

If the originals were protected from arbitrary copying by some scheme,
such as site authorization or even a robots.txt file, I'd think the
legal grounds would shift substantially.

> The basis of search engines is that they publish a related 
> link to a search enquiry with a description that at one time 
> was found in the html <title> and <description> tags. this 
> has been extended in all sorts of ways, mainly by Google, 
> without testing in any court and apparently without regard 
> to the wording of the Acts involved.

Indeed.  Think about the "Cached" link in most Google search results.

Of course, the book copying that's the current flashpoint over Google
has nothing much to do with this.  Google is copying paper books by
fairly strenuous physical means.

Bill


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