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Google is making money from other people content without permission or any type of compensation.
I know most poeople are happy to have Google display their content - but theoretically couldn't somebody sue Google for copyright violations?
as has been said - it would be doing no more than what everyone does when then visit a site and store it in their cache...
as long as the content is provided for free - the rules that mean google can show caches of pages/sites - mean that i can quite reasonably harbour pages of others sites within mine...
Harley
I doubt it. Many publishers put many of their PDF articles on the web under "personal use" copyright statements. There is no way they would do this if it immediately meant they lost all ownership. Same for news organizations. Just becuase something is free, does not mean it does not have value.
Publishing something to the web is no different from publishing a book. Both times you make the content public, whether you charge for the book/online content or not. If someone steals a book from a bookstore they have comitted a crime. If they take advantage of the fact that someone left the door open at night, they are still a theif. Just because you CAN copy a mp3 does not make it legal. If someone steals it from a library they have committed a crime even though the book, as long as they check it out is "free" - its a loan. - It still has commercial value. If they photocopy pages over and beyound the provisions of "fair use" they have committed a crime. I see no difference between online and physical publishing.
I'm not sure how a judge or court would see it of course but if a legal precedent was to support such an understanding as you outline, the web would die overnight as content and news sites (which often just reprint their physical content) would be obliged from their agreements with authors and other parties to remove any content of commercial value. The web would become an online shopping mall.
Until we have any body of legal precedent, we should just assume that the same principles that govern the convention for printed material also apply to online - in summary that you can copy parts of a document for the purpose of critical or satirical review but not to the extent that it can "replace" the original.
That to me makes the copying of meta keywords or descriptions, and short extracts as "fair use" as i see an entry in the SERPS as some sort of "review", but it makes caches possibly suspect to the extent that they could be argued to make the original redundant. I dont really see they do, and google does provide opt out.
