Slashdot Mirror
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.
I miss DejaNews - i used to use it all the time, but then they were aquired by google (very early on) and competely destroyed into the monstrosity that is now google groups. Google can be evil and ruin things too. I was actually amazed that they became a good search engine after that fiasco.
It seems that many people who use the Internet, even extensively, are ignorant of its necessities. Back in the mid-Nineties, there were very few competent search engines, so finding anything of use was difficult. You needed to know good "link lists" for any topic you were interested in, and good link lists were hard to come by. If the technologically illiterate manage to make the basic search functions of a search engine illegal, what do they expect to happen? I suspect that this plaintiff would be unhappy to find that all of his traffic suddenly vanished.