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."

Comments

Why bother w/this then?

[garcia]

The bill defines information location tools as "any instrument through which one can locate information that is available by means of the Internet or any other digital network."

Would that mean that library networks that allow you to find copyrighted material are illegal too? All of the libraries I've been in recently have an online card catalogue which is usually accessable in-house and over the web... Granted they might not be caching materials and making thumbnails but who knows? Maybe the libraries even use site:library.org with Google to do searches.

But, cautions Mr. Knopf, Bill C-60 has received first reading only, and that "there"s a lot of time for them to take this out or to fix it."

He warns that "we shouldn't cripple the Googles of the world by imposing copyright chill on the very basis of their architecture. In fact, they perform a very useful service to copyright owners by enabling easy detection of infringement. The owners should go after the actual infringer, rather than effectively shooting the messenger."

Then why even bother to draft it? This seems like an awful waste of time and energy if you know the bill could cripple the search engine industry and that's not what you want.

Short and sweet

[Alex P Keaton in da]

Short and sweet: This is what happens when legislation can't keep up with tech, and legislators don't understand tech
Look at some of the stuff here in the states- I mean, a bunch of 200 year old Supreme court judges making laws about P2P when they dont even use email????
I thought Canadians had a reputation for being reasonable....
If Google is outlawed, only Outlaws will Google.
I have to go, I need to google tyrany.

Re:Think for a second.

[Snarfangel]

I think they're aiming at things such as torrent & eMule search engines not Google and Yahoo.

Good thing lawyers and businesses always follow the spirit of the law rather than the letter of it.

Re:Take that, Canucks

[JohnnyNoSPAM]

I concur. As corporations globalize, their lobbying efforts will globalize proportionally.

Over at Groklaw, PJ touches on this in an article about Internet Archive being sued article She makes good points such as recommending that site owners utilize subscriptions to protect content that they do not wish to be open to the public domain. The is also a discussion of the robots.txt file that many sites use and search engines honor voluntarily.

Search engines are tremendously effective tools for bringing visitors to web content. Without them, many web sites would go unnoticed. I don't see that attacking the search engines will be effective. I believe that simple solutions such as those PJ has touched on are readily available and easy to implement rather than resorting to such extensive legislation, and I agree that this is what we as citizens need to convey this to our respective governments.