Google Loses Cache-Copyright Lawsuit in Belgium 340
acroyear writes "A court in Belgium has found that Google's website caching policies are a violation of that nation's copyright laws. The finding is that Google's cache offers effectively free access to articles that, while free initially, are archived and charged for via subscriptions. Google claims that they only store short extracts, but the court determined that's still a violation. From the court's ruling: 'It would be up to copyright owners to get in touch with Google by e-mail to complain if the site was posting content that belonged to them. Google would then have 24 hours to withdraw the content or face a daily fine of 1,000 euros ($1,295 U.S.).'"
Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
You have to copy content to your local machine to index it, and to be abel to select results with context. Hell, you have to copy it to *VIEW* it.
The courts and the law need to wake up and realize you can't do anything with a computer without copying it a dozen times. 25% or more of what your computer does is copy things from one place (network, hard drive, memory, external media) to another.
Re:$1,295 per day? (Score:3, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Why are newspapers retarded? (Score:4, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Personal Responsibility (Score:1, Insightful)
Google caching is a free service which is optional. Web site owners have total control over it. Note the following:
If this is in place the site does not get cached.
I hope Google is responding to such frivilous complaints and lawsuits by completely removing those sites from their index. If they do not remove those companies, they are doing evil through omission by allowing other companies to do evil to remain in business.
Public Domain (Score:1, Insightful)
The way I see it, once you release media free of charge to the general public its content becomes public domain.
More stupidity (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:That's unfortunate (Score:1, Insightful)
If you must make it publicly available on your website, then don't complain when it gets cached.
If your business model requires that everyone else in the world do absurd things that don't make sense (like fail to cache and redistribute publicly available information when the cost to do so is virtually zero), then go find a better buisness model.
Our laws should not make us pretend that reality is other than it is, or that the technological landscape has failed to take on a new shape.
Current copyright law is producing these sorts of absurd contradictions. The law, not the basic principles of human behavior, should be changed.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What's the problem? (Score:4, Insightful)
Problem is.... newspapers, wanna have their pie and eat it too.
Solution.... it's Google's fault.
Result.... news dinosaurs go extinct and news mammals come to rule Earth
Moral.... don't be greedy beyond survival.
Extend robots.txt? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Personal Responsibility (Score:3, Insightful)
Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
If that is true, then why do I see copyright statements at the beginning of books and DVDs? It would seem the publishers are being hypocritical - they post their content publicly, refuse to use the robots.txt file, and then go on a litigation rampage when someone actually makes use of their web site. They're little different than the kid who takes his ball and goes home when he starts losing the game.
Furthermore, I would argue that posting to a web page is implied permission because the owners do so expecting their work to be copied to personal computers. In an interesting turn of events, private individuals are allowed to copy and archive web pages, but Google is not.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
On the web, caching search engines have been in existence for a lot longer than expiring content has been around. It's established that search engines are a neccesity, and that robots.txt is the way to opt-out. When you do business in a new arena, it makes sense that the existing rules of the arena should apply.
Re:Abstracts are illegal? (Score:2, Insightful)
Just Pull Out (Score:5, Insightful)
Caching is Copying (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What's the problem? (Score:5, Insightful)
Good answer.
This ruling doesn't significantly hurt Google. Alas, it only hurts everyone else -- all billion or so of Google's users. Having quick access to (at least a chunk of) a piece of content, especially when that content has expired or is temporarily unreachable, is convenient and valuable. Many times in my own searches, the piece of data I anxiously sought was available only in the cache.
Let's hope that Google does not respond to the ruling by across-the-board reducing or removing the cache feature.
Re:Personal Responsibility (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So no "fair dealing" or "fair use" in Belgium? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Public Domain (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't that undermine the GPL? If the linux kernel is in the public domain, companies could use it freely without having to give back.
Or what about street-performers performing their own material?
Re:Personal Responsibility (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ridiculous (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Personal Responsibility (Score:2, Insightful)
Spam is a free service which is optional. Email address owners have total control over it. Use the unsubscribe link at the bottom of the email.
Assuming those unsubscribe links would work (we all know they don't), would you consider this a logical way of thinking? If tomorrow some other caching company comes along and introduces another way in which website owners have 'total control', will that clear them from copyright violation? What if I want my content to be cached on proxies, but I don't like them to be accessible from a massively public accessible and searchable cache?
Personal opinion:
To be honest, I don't think Google needs to stop caching anything automatically. The ruling states copyright owners need to contact Google and Google needs to respond by taking the content offline within 24 hours. That doesn't seem completely impossible to do, and that way they can keep caching those who don't contact them.
Re:Why are newspapers retarded? (Score:3, Insightful)
No, he makes a good point. If someone files a lawsuit against Google, all Google would have to do to stop them would be to suspend their site from all indexing and search results. There's no God-given right to be indexed by a search engine. Bad analogy; imagine you sell hot meaty pies, and some random guy walks around the town carrying a board with the words, "Eat Anonymous Coward's Hot Meaty Pies Today!!!". Now imagine that guy does it for free. Suing Google is somewhat like taking the guy to court because "Anonymous Coward" is your trademark and he didn't pay for a license to use it.
Re:Caching is Copying (Score:3, Insightful)
I have news for you. When you stream your browser makes a local copy of portions of the stream, decodes them, and displays them.
If sampling is illegal (without permission) then clearly copying a portion of a video stream without permission would be illegal. However, since you can give permission to anyone you like, there's no crime being committed, as making a stream publicly availably is granting permission.
Re:Public Domain (Score:4, Insightful)
Then, perhaps its good that the rest of the world doesn't see it the way you do.
Because if the world were to be the way you see it, the entire web content industry would immediately go pay-per-view or subscription only to avoid all their work becoming public domain. Yes, what you propose would literally destroy the useful and open environment of the Internet.
Servers, bandwidth, and writers don't pay for themselves. If these sites can be copied wholesale and put up elsewhere without the original author having a say in the matter, you've just destroyed any monetary incentive to create. Much as many people like to think otherwise, money is important, and a strong incentive to create.
Re:Abstracts are illegal? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Abstract" and "extract" are not interchangeable terms.
An abstract is a meta-description of a document, giving an overview of its content but usually not using any of the document content itself. An extract, on the other hand, is a literal subset of the document.
Re:Ridiculous (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So no "fair dealing" or "fair use" in Belgium? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, you have to bribe your way to a victory just like everywhere else!
Re:What's the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
You are right that determining what is moral is subjective. However, I will point out that most people would probably not see envision that their moral framework would change with time. That is, someone opposed to human slavery would presumably find the behavior repugnant whether it was done by people in the 18th century or in the present day. Someone opposed to abortion would not find it permissible so long as it was legal somewhere, or at another time. Apply this to copyright, and things fall apart. Is it okay to copy something after 30 years if it was published in the 1800s? But now it's 90 years? Why was it okay to copy something after 30 years before and 90 years now? Am I morally corrupt if I still use the old 30 year rule? Or is it because I broke the law, irrespective of what the law says? My point is that copyright changes constantly over time and varies from country to country. It is impossible to have a consistent moral view if you include copyright - it's basis has nothing to do with morals.
robots.txt (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not in terms of copyright law (Score:5, Insightful)
Google: Hey, what that page? Can I see? (HTTP GET)
Them
Give them a choice. (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems to me that Google is in a good position now to offer a deal to sites; they can either agree to be crawled, and thus end up in a cache for 30 days or whatever, or they can just not end up in the index at all. Their option.
Get rid of the "oh we want to be in the index and get traffic, but not be cached" option, which is basically web sites wanting to have their cake and eat it too.
I think these sites have an inflated opinion of their own relevance to the world. They can sue Google, but Google can effectively remove them from the Internet, at least as far as 70-90 [skrenta.com]% (depending on who's doing the counting) of users are concerned.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
I think that the problem is that copyright law is largely based on physical media, and electronic distribution is a headache for the courts to sort out. For instance, with a book there is very little problem in just saying "Don't make a copy." You can use a book without making a copy. Electronic distribution is different - several copies are needed to make the information usable. Let's use the scenario where you download an ebook while sitting in Starbucks. Starting with the copyright holder's server, you have copies made by internet routers on the way to the Starbucks. These are commercial copies - the routers are routing data for money, not for personal fair use. Many routers will cache popular data to cut down on bandwidth. Then you have the T-Mobile access point that you are hooked into at Starbucks - another commercial service. You make a copy on your local hard drive, and then another copy to your screen so that you can read this ebook.
So no one seems to be attacking the idea of caching copyrighted material for purposes of making money - it is done for network efficiency all the time. So what line has Google crossed? They make the cache directly accessible, so that it is obvious that you are looking at the cache. That's kind of an odd line, though, because presumably then the court would have been fine with a service like Google, except that the caching is invisible to the end user.
Another problem is archival. In the physical media world, there is little danger of our culture disappearing. A book can be archived indefinitely. So can a DVD or CD. Web sites, on the other hand, are by their nature transient. We risk losing a historical record of our culture if we disallow caching. We would need a new law to allow this, unfortunately.
Copyright law is fun!
Re:Public Domain (Score:3, Insightful)
Copyright has destroyed more then it has helped. I refer to what was happening before the revalutionary war.
This effect was curtailed by the 14 yaer limitation, but now that there isn't a real expiration date to copyright* it is happening again. Corporation are getting so much power that they are controlling culture.
Now, I don't agree with the original post about public domain, because by hos logic every book in a book store is public domain. I also believe a limited copyright is a good thing(14 years, 6 year extension). But if it became down to no copyright, and an unlimited copyright, I'll choose no copyright.
*Yes there is a limit, but for all intent and purposes it's meaningless.
THE INTERNET DOES NOT WORK THAT WAY!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
You did "opt in," by broadcasting your shit on the Internet in the first place!
Don't like it? Don't upload it! Why is that simple concept so fucking hard to understand?!
I mean, jeez -- don't you realize that what you're saying is equivalent to yelling in my ear and then complaining that I heard you?
Re:Here is the problem (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
But this isn't just copying to a personal computer, it's copying and redistributing in a modified form while passing on some of the expense to the original host site and concealing information that the original host site would otherwise have received.
Individuals aren't, in general, allowed to redistribute entire works subject to others' copyright either.
As an aside, I also don't have a problem with a commercial corporation not automatically having the same rights as a private citizen. The world would be a better place if more legal systems understood that they are not the same.
Re:What's the problem? (Score:3, Insightful)
And then, send a carbon copy to IBM and Sun and thousands of other companies that pretty much do things the same way (and have their own patches)?
Re:Copyright is opt-out, not opt-in (Score:3, Insightful)
Long accepted custom counts in most jurisdictions court systems. Especially in light of the default, everyone permitted. By making content available on a public web server you are obviously OK with anyone looking at it, Google included. If you don't want the big G looking, the accepted custom is to place a line into robots.txt telling that search engine to stay out. Of course no sane business would willingly disappear themselves from the net like that, so these guys want to dictate the TERMS under which Google indexes and presents their content.
Google should start making examples of some of these cases. Simply delete them. And ask for a declaratory judgement as to whether any other entity in that country can sue on similar grounds. If the court gives the wrong answer announce a near date when they will delete the entire
Governments will continue to try extending their tentacles into the network until the major stakeholders start kneecapping em at the first hint of interferrence.