Google Wins a Court Battle

Gosalia wrote to let us know about an article which opens with: "In a legal win for Google, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by a writer who claimed the search giant infringed on his copyright by archiving a Usenet posting of his and providing excerpts from his Web site in search results." Thankfully, we can all still read Usenet articles on Google as well as other archive services.

Comments

Cash Grab Suit?

[Saeed al-Sahaf]

He sued over Google indexing and achieving a USNET post of his, so this means he isn't that technologically ignorant. To me, his suit smells like a cash grab. But it's also good he lost because it sets a useful precedent.

Re:Cash Grab Suit?

[Anonymous Crowhead]

It sets no precedent. Rambling, incoherent lawsuits that get dismissed do not constitute precedent.

50,000 John Does?
Racketeering?
Civil conspiracy?

The guy sounds like a nut job.

Re:Cash Grab Suit?

[tinkertim]

If nothing else it helps to show lawmakers some actual case law (in their lanugage) to say "store and forward" doesn't always imply the same thing, its the content that is of interest.

I hope if nothing else this case helps focus more on the content, and less on the delivery method. A parallel being torrents that bring you linux Distributions vs torrents that bring you copyrighted media.

Just shows, we really *dont* shoot the messenger these days :) At least not this time.

However you're right, its frivilous and sets no real precedent. But makes way for some perhaps :)

Re:Cash Grab Suit?

[gad_zuki!]

Cash grab? I dont know his motivations but these are real questions that need to be answered. The legality of google's cache was always in question. For instance a person could delete a webpage but still find it in the cache. That person can ask a valid question about copyright, control, republishing, etc, etc.

The courts so far have ruled that these caches are legal and the search engine people are not doing wrong. This suit along with another one builds precendce over these types of concerns. So its been a long time coming.

Now people concerned with privacy can get educated about how to block robots/spider, how public the web/usenet is, and how to work around this.

Re:Cash Grab Suit?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can't unpublish a book... call all the libraries and tell them to throw the book away... how's a cache any different?

You publish or you don't.

Re:Strange Decision

[Just Some Guy]

I don't see how creating an archive of billions of copyrighted works [...]

You left out "that were submitted to a store-and-forward global distribution system with the intent of disseminating them as widely as possible, knowing full well that they would be archived, folded, spindled, and mutilated".

In other news, every public mailing list in the known universe does the exact same thing. Gonna sue Yahoo! Groups because they're publishing the email that you deliberately sent to 1,500 strangers?

Content isn't that special...get over it

[doubledoh]

That's the way it should be. I'm tired of people trying to undermine most of the good reasons the web exists because they are worried about losing "control" of their content. Content in the context of 6 billion people (and growing) just isn't worth as much as it once was. Think about it. When you were a kid, getting a new CD (or tape/LP) was a pretty special event because the low-tech cumbersome delivery system limited the supply and frequency of new content. Now it's as easy as clickity click on your web browser (or p2p app) to find millions of different ways to entertain yourself. We have a growing sense that content is meant to be disseminated more freely...because it IS disseminated more freely...and exponentially so. Just the idea of being able to read newspapers from around the world for FREE would be crazy just 10-15 years ago...now it's a given. Same goes with content on people's web sites. Everyone's got a freaking webpage now (hell, I've got dozens...half of which I don't even remember exist)...so unique and special and limited content is being dwarfed by voluminous amounts of content in every possible variety and quality one can imagine.

The bottom line...your damn content isn't that special anymore! Stop suing people! Get over it...we probably already forgot about the content we "stole" or archived long before you remembered to call your lawyer. We moved on to the next thing before you could look up "cache" for FREE on dictionary.com.

Re:Content isn't that special...get over it

[wall0159]

I hate DRM/copyright/etc as much as the next /.er.. but...

I think that the easy availability of 'content' has also cheapened it*. Sure, there are 6 billion or so people, and maybe they can all (one day) make content. The truth is, 99.99% of it will be complete crap.

Is it possible for people to sift through 10000 pieces of crap to find one useful/good item? No. People will do what they've always done - go with the crowd. One could argue that this is the 'service' that a centralised distribution system (currently known as a 'record company') provides, but I think even in the future these things will be useful.

For example, how would you find a good jazz album on p2p or bittorrent - if you don't know what it's called? both are really geared to shareing known material - if I made an album and posted it on either, there'd be bloody few downloads!

Sure, there are systems like last.fm, and to a certain extent they *can* replace current distribution systems, when coupled with p2p/BT/etc, but essentially people will still want some review process - that's why Google Scholar isn't putting academic journals out of business.

(*) Just on a side note - I was walking along listening to my ipod the other day, and I started thinking about how little attention I usually pay to the music that its playing. This is very different to our grandparents, who would've given total attention to music. Now, it's just another background noise (not always, of course). We're damn lucky - 4 to 5 generations ago there was *only* 'live' music, now, music's ubiquitous...

Re:Strange Decision

[Waffle Iron]

What if I posted a licence with my content stating that only nntp servers and individuals could redistribute what I have posted?

I've got a much simpler idea: If you don't want something to get freely archived and redistributed by countless 3rd parties outside your control, why don't you just try not posting it on Usenet?

Re:Thankfully?

[jgardner100]

I disagree, Usenet was always store and forward, Google are simply using a ridiculously long expire time in this case. There was never any restriction on how long a site could keep the postings for, they were/are simply constrained by available disk space.

Re:Gtalk

[publius_jr]

The explanation (http://mail.google.com/mail/help/chat.html#offrec ord):

We know that sometimes, you don't want a particular chat, or chats with a specific person, to be saved. Most existing IM services give no indication of whether the person you're chatting with is saving your conversation. But when chatting in Gmail or Google Talk, you can go "off the record," so that nothing typed from that point forward gets saved in anyone's Gmail account.

Unless I am missing something, this is a perfect example of the ambiguity of their Terms of Service/Privacy Policy. The user may wrongfully infer from the user interface that "off the record" means "no one, whether a user or Google, can save this chat." Yet nowhere have I seen any promise that Google will not save the content of your chat, whether any option is selected or not.

Re:Gtalk

[Crizp]

You're right, the chats might still be stored on their servers somewhere... just flagged as hidden. I thought about that before starting to use the service, but came to the conclusion that I don't care. Mostly because
1) US paranoia-legislations and assramming-acts do not apply here, thank FSM, and
2) Norwegian laws regarding information extraction by police/etc from service providers are reasonably strict, i.e. they need to have a case. Also,
3) Should I ever want to discuss something illegal I would either use GPG through email or encrypted IM anyway.

Re:Your Choice (X-noarchive)

[Beryllium Sphere(tm)]

Usenet was around a LONG time (1980 was the announcement of "A" news) before X-noarchive came along (1996? I can't find an earlier reference but I thought it was earlier). By now it's really unclear what a Usenet poster in, say, 1983 "intended". You certainly didn't "always" have that choice.

Parker doesn't have that excuse though.

Re:Google is in the right.

[Beolach]

would it be OK for me to post a leter to everyone in my apartment block asking them to reply if they don't want me to break in to their home and take all their stuf. If they don't reply, I'm doing nothing illegal by breaking in and taking it all, right?

I can't believe how often people make that argument. That's a horrible analogy. Browsing, spidering, indexing, or caching a publicly accessable website is nothing like breaking and entering. It's more like picking up a flier off a stack under a sign saying "TAKE A FLYER". If you don't want people taking your flyers, don't stick them under a sign saying "TAKE A FLYER": if you don't want people accessing your website, don't make it publicly accessable on the internet.

Re:Your Choice (X-noarchive)

[pomo monster]

"You always had a choice in the matter via the 'X-noarchive' flag" ...unless someone quotes your post in a reply.

Re:Gtalk

[F�an�ro]

Should I ever want to discuss something illegal I would either use GPG through email or encrypted IM anyway.

Which in turn makes it easier to prove it was you who sent the message, for example if your partner later decides to betray you.

Re:Gtalk

[Toby_Tyke]

3) Should I ever want to discuss something illegal I would either use GPG through email or encrypted IM anyway.

I prefer to discuss all my illegal activities using the RL protocol.