Google Cache Makes Murdoch's K-12 Site Look Obscene

theodp writes "Rupert Murdoch's Amplify Education site is all about the kids, so it's understandable that the site's Terms of Use bans abusive, pornographic, obscene, and vulgar content. But if one uses Google to do a site search of Amplify.com (e.g., site:amplify.com donkey) you may get quite an unexpected eye-opener (redacted, but still NSFW). So, does someone at Amplify really want to "@&^$" your "a**"? Of course not. But this does serve as a cautionary tale of the perils of buying a second-hand domain name when pages of the shuttered site may live on in cache-land. Prior to its conversion to a site for kids' education, Amplify.com was a social sharing product that allowed users to clip favorite sites from the web and add their own commentary. Google does note that removed content may still show up in Google's search results in certain situations (removal requests can be made)." Update: 04/08 17:04 GMT by T : Stephanie Chang writes (in a comment below): "Hi, I’m the editor of Amplify.com. We purchased our domain name in February 2012 and took ownership of the site in July 2012 for use as our company's home page. Prior to that, the domain was used by its previous owners as a social-sharing site. As a result, some old content dating back to the previous domain ownership still shows up as cached on certain search engines. Amplify Education, Inc. did not produce the cached content in question nor do we in any way endorse it. We’re working with Google and other search providers to make sure caches of our site are up to date. In the meantime, we apologize to anyone whose attempts to locate information on amplifying donkeys resulted in a negative browsing experience."

Comments

"Cache-land"

[mumblestheclown]

Look - I know many of you are *philosophically* opposed to copyright. Fine. Whatever.

But put that aside for a moment and take it as a given that copyright exists. I really struggle understanding how it is legal, other than 'google has expensive lawyers' that one private entity can take the contents of another website, store them, and then essentially re-publish them for money (google is largely advertiser supported, even if the adverts dont necessarily directly appear on the cached page). This is especially true when you see here that google's actions can directly reputationally harm one of those whose site is is "caching."

Really, under what theory is this remotely consistent with copyright as we understand it? It passes no test of "fair use" whatsoever.

Notice that my comments aren't in any way related to whether the google caching is useful from a user's standpoint. Of course it is or can be. But, from a copyright standpoint, I have a lot of sympathy with righsholders.

Note also that the argument that "getting your stuff copied" should be an opt-out situation (as in "well, you can always put a robots.txt" or "you can always do steps x y and z") i find weak. this is what in essence we have with the DMCA and youtube - and you see it takes all of an instant from the time that any given video is taken down to the time that it's up again in some other form Rightsholders have to have *full time* people involved in policing sites like youtube.. something just isnt right about that.

If google is indeed providing a useful service to company/site x/y/z, then company x/y/z should be able to welcome such caching by an opt-in robots.txt. the current situation, given how copyright law actually exists in most jurisdiction, is perverse.