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Googling May Break Copyright in Canada
twray writes "From The Globe&Mail: Could it be possible that Canada will make Google or any other Internet search and archiving engines illegal?
Bill C-60, which amends the Copyright Act and received its first reading in the House of Commons on June 20, suggests it could be illegal for anyone to provide copyrighted information through "information-location tools," which includes search engines."
It should be widely known by any webmaster that you can simply place a robots.txt in your index folder and Google, archive.org, or any major archiving service will simply leave your whole site alone. No questions asked. It seems that going after google for something that would only take 5 minutes on your behalf is a little overboard.
Breakfast served all day!
I did some research (using Google, oddly enough) and found a petition against most of what is in this bill.
http://www.digital-copyright.ca/petition/
Indeed, that is something that all Canadians who are against this bill should sign, no doubt.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
can be found here
Uncopyrightable: The longest word you can write without repeating a letter.
IANAL.
However, the copyright holder needs to contact the source in question to have material removed. And, as far as I can tell, can only file an injunction. Reading C-60 myself, it reads as if it's making an exception specifically for search engines such that it isn't illegal copyright violation until such an injunction is filed.
Makes sense that, if you ask a search engine to remove your content, they would comply. Just like most comply with robots.txt and whatnot.
Sorry man :(
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http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/07/13/0
~ Crummy
Here is the scoop. The Bill is ISP friendly (no liability for being the means of communication by which copyright infringement occurs), and will likely be Google-friendly by the same provisions. What we have is a Bill diluted from the insane brainchild of the Liberal-Heritage Ministry-Copyright Lobby circle jerk thanks to various factors, largely thanks to the efforts of everybody-who-isn't-a-blood-sucking-copyright-lobb y-group.
The Bill will go for second reading when parliament resumes, and will probably get passed before the minority Liberal government calls a vote in late winter/early spring. PM Martin has control of the government thanks to his willingness to give the NDP the budget ammendment reach-around, the Conservative leader's brilliant alienation of his only allies (the separatist Bloc Quebecois), and the voting tendencies of the Canadian public (no matter what the Liberals do to prove they are corrupt, voters in Ontario will still vote for them whether or not Stephen Harper keeps ramming his foot in his mouth).
perl -e 'print $i=pack(c5, (41*2), sqrt(7056), (unpack(c,H)-2), oct(115), 10)'
It just means liberal with spending.
They're a big party and the processes to prevent kickbacks, etc aren't there. When the cat's away the mice will play.
The leader of the opposition, Mr Harper is less hardcore moral conservative than Bush but he still freaks a lot of people out with his charter rights violating morality. Here, getting gay marrage through was pretty much a breeze, as stopping it would have required a declaration from parlaiment that they were passing legislation in direct contravention of the charter of rights and freedoms (aka the not withstanding clause). The clause was added to appease some of the other provences that weren't totally happy with the wording of the charter at the time by giving them an out. Using the clause would be akin to Bush banning evolution and forcing bible class and having to announce, "I'm passing this knowing that it violates the constitution - suck it up".
Fair use.
Let's not forget that a blanket ban would also prohibit the syntax-highlighted snippets that allow you to skip search engine spam-sites. Also, they don't cache sites indefinately, and don't even include images, so you're better off going to the original site anyway - if it's reachable and the content is still available, that is.
And let's not forget, any time I visit a website, I make a copy of it. No one gave me permission for that. It just happens because you happen to publish it on a publically accesible website with no access controls whatsoever. Common sense would dictate that you want me to see it, or you wouldn't have put it online. Now, if I have permission to copy it and to cache it, and obviously my ISP has permission to cache it in its proxy, why shouldn't google? Try defining a distinction in legalese that doesn't cut on both sides. Or how about you don't and you let judges decide where the line is, based on current legislation, on a case-by-case basis. If the balance sways too much in one direction in case law, THEN the laws can be fixed. (No judge would let you archive "all the current books, newspaper articles, movies, and music" under existing law.)
What we're seeing now are corporations lobbying for laws to be changed pre-emptively to redress an imbalance in favor of the public that DOES NOT YET EXIST. In theory at least. Of course in actual fact they're just lobbying for the balance to go entirely their way so they can nickle and dime ordinary Joes like us every living breathing moment. Legislators will figure it out, but it'll probably take 40 years, unless we, the public, also lobby them.
Remember, radio stations were outlawed when they started up in the US, because of copyright. Now they're recognized as a straight up advertising channel for the record companies (payola).
Disclaimer: this is ivory-tower thinking. Of course it matters.
Scholar Google provides direct links to papers which require a subscription to access, and also links to those same papers which are either google cached or hosted on a non subscription website, thus pointing to something that would normally require a subscription to access.
Warning, comments may not have been passed by the sanity department of my brain.
Key concept there: Links to.
As in "does not store themselves".