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Google Wins a Court Battle

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the justice-served dept.

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.

6 of 272 comments (clear)

  1. Cash Grab Suit? by Saeed+al-Sahaf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
    1. Re:Cash Grab Suit? by Anonymous+Crowhead · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    2. Re:Cash Grab Suit? by gad_zuki! · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:Cash Grab Suit? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.

  2. Re:Strange Decision by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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?

    --
    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
  3. Re:Gtalk by publius_jr · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.