Did you see the Google Blog about Fair Use? They're lobbying in Washington to defend causes they care about. Will they be protecting us more? Or Google's right to use things like "cache" etc? Is this good for the small webmaster or bad?
This is good for anybody who is re-publishing content under current fair-use laws and bad for anybody publishing original content.
Well in the past few weeks I've had to get knee deep into copyright laws and the fair use defense against copyright infringement because of copyright infringement claims against on of my sites. Based on my research and the input from our attorneys from a top US firm specializing in copyright law, standard search engine style summary of copyright material almost always will constitute fair use. I can't speak to the issues of showing the entire cache page or of images like google does since we don't do that. The case law for images and for displays of a cached page is muddled. I would very much disagree with this blanket statement: You don't think publishers of unique content want to have their content in the search engines? Of course they do. The argument is really over where the line should be drawn to define fair use vs. infringement. When a search engine displays a cache page they argue the page is substantially less valuable than the entire work which is the full website. IMHO not true in all situations. But, just the standard 200 character summary? Give me a break. The other big question is how can information that is presented in a digital medium be consumed? If someone reads a book and then publishes a summary (even a very detailed summary like cliff's notes), that is fair use. In the digital world with software spiders consuming the information, the way they "read" is to "scan, index, store, and score". Some early arguments against search engines fair use say that because they scan and store the full work, they have already engaged in copyright infringement. Thankfully (again IMHO) these arguments failed. Copyright is about protecting the original author's rights to the original body of work. It isn't supposed to be about limiting the ability of other people, (and now search engines) from consolidating, cataloging, commenting on, or otherwise providing reviews and summary information of copyright works. Ha! Can you tell I'm a bit miff'ed about having to spend thousands defending against this crap!
Excellent summary Nitin, thank you. Very well said. Must really suck. Are you going up against some big player or an author or small website?
A publisher wants his content indexed, but Google goes beyond indexing and summary results, as you point out. If Google is allowed to cache the Web, then publishers no longer control their content and that's bad for all publishers.
I tend to agree to some extent. Of course this will rely totally on the type of site and what the site provides to visitors. I'm not sure how long Google keeps cached pages, but I think it's not all bad. A cached page might even lead to new people discovering your site. But this is definitely very much a "grey area".