copyright laws and search engines

[Pekka]

what do you think? Some French news paper/station sued Google for its 'copyright' issues, meaning that since search engines such as Google, the way it works is that they save some stuff for indexing etc.. now, the suing party says Google saved copyrighted stuff, and that's illegal by the laws, and the role of search engines has not been dealt with at all, meaning it's either going to be a loophole for search engines, or that the law will have no loopholes.

The law is, that I can not save copyrighted material if it's forbidden from me without the permission at all, not even partially, not even for nanosecond. It's very clear (the law) about that, but that brings obvious problems for example to search engines, and needless to say we like our search engines and what they are doing is going for technicality and trying to exploit this situation by suing Google for this, trying to score money.

Technically they are right, and when talking about technicalities, orgs like RIAA etc are very in love with making love to the dot, adn holding on to technicalities, and with common sense they are just greedy bastards, just like this google case, but if they have the right to destroy private people with it, why shouldn't you be able to do it to big instances, such as google?

Of course, common sense again says that this is crap.

What do you think?

[Urban Ranger]

There's a thing called "fair use" in the copyright law in most countries. Not sure about France, though

Speaking of which, there is a similar case in the US:

Blake Field, an author and attorney, brought the copyright infringement lawsuit against Google after the search engine automatically copied and cached a story he posted on his website. The district court found that Mr. Field “attempted to manufacture a claim for copyright infringement against Google in hopes of making money from Google’s standard [caching] practice.” Google responded that its Google Cache feature, which allows Google users to link to an archival copy of websites indexed by Google, does not violate copyright law.

EFF

[Pekka]

Actually this GOogle case is taken in US courts. So, the French .. instance took this thing to US courts in particular. Yes there is 'fair use', but does Google fall into that category, there's no wide agreement on that yet. Like I said, can it get into the loophole or not, I think the courts will make some kind of pre.. what you call them.. a decision that can be referred into later on, well, that's still on its way.

If you ask me, I'd say there's no problem, but then again lots of greedy people out there so it might go to technicality.

[-Jrabbit]

The word you're looking for is "precedent."

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by Pekka
If you ask me, I'd say there's no problem, but then again lots of greedy people out there so it might go to technicality.

Yeah, there are loads of greedy people out there trying to get rich quick by suing others. This is one of the major reasons why the US patent system is such a mess.