Google cache and copyright issues

[jefnvk]

Just wondering, how does Google get around copyright issues?  They are storing copyrighted information on their servers, and making it available for public use.  To me, that seems to be a violation of copyright laws, so how does it happen?

[Guest]

I read recently that they were being sued by some textbook publishers for that.

[Harold Tuttle]

Google in their "do no evil" quest to know everything are getting a tad loose with copyright

they are offering to digitize entire libraries

but the book warehouses don't hold the copyright to their collections...

but google has 56 billion dollars

[LaTropa64]

I don't know, but maybe it's the same reason that we can have a cache on our harddrive? Every web page you visit gets copied to your computer and stays there for awhile, with most browsers anyways. I don't think we are getting permission to copy all these pages, but we are doing it anyways. :dunno:

[jefnvk]

I never even thought about that, latropa.  Although, the pages on your hard drive are not being redistributed.  That would be the bigger concern to me, is that google freely distributes the information to whomever wants it.

I guess it'd be like me copying some pages of a book in a library to take back and study, and me copying those pages, making a few hundred copies, and giving them to whoever sent me a self-addressed stamped envelope.

[Dave Markowitz]

There's a difference between your hard drive's browser cache and Google's cache.

There is implied consent from web publishers for your computer to cache the contents of their web pages on your hard disk.  It's part of the way the web works, and if caching didn't exist, the web wouldn't work nearly as well due to increased bandwidth demands.

Google's cache, OTH, does present some very real copyright questions.  Most web publishers would want their info cached by Google, however, I'd think.

[cfabe]

Many network operators use caching servers so that everytime someone in your office/university/whatever opens, say, google, they just send you a local copy instead of using up internet bandwidth for the same page joe in the next office just downloaded 2 seconds ago. This software has never been challenged, as far as I know. Google's is just public, but all the webpages are made publicly available anyway.