Another score for electronic freedom

TechNews - Another score for electronic freedom http://technews.iit.edu/index.php?option=3Dcom_content&task=3Dview&id=3D149= &Itemid=3D40

Written by Justin Schenck =A0=A0

Tuesday, 31 January 2006

If you know me, you know I am not a fan of the DMCA. The DMCA is short for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which has been a source of justification for all sorts of electronic civil rights violations. However, something good has finally come of the DMCA.

Blake Field is an author and an attorney. He sued Google in district court alleging copyright infringement. How? Google Cache had saved fifty one of his registered copyrighted works on their popular addition to the Google search engine. Predictably, Field sought $2.55 million in statutory damages. Mr. Field also knew that there is a tag you can put on your web site to prevent Google Cache from storing it. He also explicitly made a robots.txt file to invite Google there. He wrote these fifty one works explicitly to register them for copyright and sue Google with. Upon Google being served with the suit, they dropped all cached links to Mr. Field's site and informed him they would not cache his pages if he did not want them to. He didn't care =96 he got what he wanted, the lawsuit.

The Nevada district court ruled in favor of Google. They agreed that Mr. Field's lawsuit was intellectually dishonest and his behavior was explicitly to trap Google into a lawsuit. The court also said that Google Cache is part of fair use under U.S. copyright law. Shockingly enough, they also ruled that the claim is precluded by the "system cache" safe harbor of Section 512(b) of the DMCA. This decision has far-reaching consequences as well. It sets a precedent that can protect sites like the Wayback Machine from similar lawsuits. The Wayback Machine was sued a while back by the "Church" of Scientology for hosting copies of the website http://www.xenu.net, an anti-Scientology site.

The court decision is available online. I recommend anyone who is interested in electronic law to read the 25 page decision at the Electronic Frontier Foundation's site:

http://www.eff.org/IP/blake_v_google/google_nevada_order.pdf. =A0 Copyright 2005 TechNews. All rights reserved. Designed by Wesley Leggette. Powered by Mambo.

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