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

Gtalk

[skaet]

Can't wait until people try to sue Google for saving their Gtalk conversations....

Re:Gtalk

[publius_jr]

According to their Terms of Service (http://www.google.com/talk/terms.html), by using GTalk:

You agree that Google may access or disclose your personal information, including the content of your communications, if Google is required to do so in order to comply with any valid legal process or governmental request (such as a search warrant, subpoena, statute, or court order). [Emphasis added]

According to their Privacy Policy (http://www.google.com/talk/privacy.html):

When you use Google Talk, we may record information about your usage, such as when you use Google Talk, the size of your contact list and the contacts you communicate with, and the frequency and size of data transfers.

But regarding to the content of your chats, their Privacy Policy only says:

You may choose to store the contents of text chats as Gmail messages in your Gmail account.

Note that it does not say whether Google saves or does not save the content of your chats elsewhere on their computers (i.e. not as Gmail messages). I suppose their right to access the content grants them the right to save it, although it is a bit odd that they don't flat-out state this (or deny it) on their Privacy Policy.

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: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

[Just Some Guy]

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.

You wouldn't use a private key, for Pete's sake - you'd use symmetric encryption. You, your accomplice, and an unverifiably large set of strangers would all know the shared passphrase, and each of you could plausibly deny that the other encrypted it.

If you're going to conspire, you'll have to be more clever than that.

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:Cash Grab Suit?

[pomo monster]

Not that I have any sympathy for the joker, but do realize that X-No-Archive is useless if someone replies to your post.

--
On 17 March 2006, onedotzero (926558) wrote:

Perhaps. But with regards to Usenet, that's exactly what X-No-Archive is for.

--
onedotzero
thedigitalfeed.co.uk

Re:Cash Grab Suit?

[jcr]

To me, his suit smells like a cash grab.

Got it on the very first guess!

Gordon Roy Parker, to whom I usually refer as "grp" (rhymes with twerp), having nothing better to do, likes to waste the taxpayers' money on frivolous lawsuits like this one where he demanded ten billion(!) dollars from Google and fifty thousand(!) John Does for having archived a newsgroup. One of his other hilarious escapades was suing U. Penn for discrimination against him because he's a white male(!), when he didn't even apply for a job there!

He's up for a lifetime "Balsa Gavel" award in alt.usenet.kooks.

-jcr

Good for Google!

[those.numbers]

I may not agree with every decision Google makes, but all in all, I believe they're the closest thing we've got to a big business with a conscience. I mean they've got great potential to do some good, as this article points out. http://tcal.net/archives/2006/02/23/google-charity -plans/

But without getting too off track, I'm glad they won this battle. Because of their line of work and the innovative new steps they take, they're bound to step on a few toes. I just hope we don't smother them in too many lawsuits, both as indivduals and as a government.

They won the battle ...

[arrrrg]

but the war is still to come. It's interesting to contrast this with their recent loss against Perfect 10. Compared to the lawsuits from the publishers and the US government, this one seems like an easy victory.

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:Strange Decision

[Just Some Guy]

Archiving and redistributing aren't the same thing.

Sure they are. Google just happens to run an NNTP server with a pretty interface and a long expiration time. There're tens of thousands of messages stored on my own server, reader for public distribution, at this very moment.

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

As long as we're throwing out goofy ideas: what if I scream into a restaurant that no one is allowed to tell anyone else what I'm about to say?

When you contract with a carrier of a wide-open public medium to deliver your message to the world, you have no right to expect that another carrier of that medium won't deliver to someone you didn't expect, or in a form you didn't anticipate.

Google is in the right.

[atomic-penguin]

There exists several legitimate ways to keep your web content out of google's indexes.  They respect all of the following methods.  Google even has a page titled "Google information for webmasters" which documents most of these.  On what grounds does one have to sue?

* E-mail header that prevent google groups from archiving your message: "X-No-Archive: Yes".
* Meta tags: <META NAME="Googlebot" CONTENT="nofollow">
* Hyperlinks <a href="http://google.com" rel="nofollow">
* robots.txt file with proper syntax
* Google's link removal page: http://www.google.com/webmasters/remove.html

Troll

[Anonymous Coward]

My jaw dropped when I started reading this article... I was surprised that this guy has made the news.

Gordon Roy Parker is the resident troll on various Usenet groups. He has been around for years, and alternates between posting nonsense disguised as an informed opinion and accusing other posters of plagiarizing his writing. I think he may also sell an e-book about seduction.

Here are some references

Suegle

[JRGhaddar]

Google should just start "Suegle" so we all can set up our own personal lawsuits against google.

Features include:

-the ability to blog about the lawsuit and how much of google's money we are trying to get.

-RSS feeds of the latest filings & verdicts

-Lawyers oncall via GTalk

feel free to add any I'm missing

Re:Strange Decision

[Rakishi]

Check court cases, there is the concept of implied license. For example, web browsers are given an implied license by web site owners to copy content for viewing purposes.