[Taylor514ce]

Some specific lawsuits I know of: New York Times, which provides certain content to subscribers only. Google became a subscriber, took the content, and cached it. Non-subscribers could then view the content directly from Google's cache. To suggest that this was ethical because the New York Times didn't have a no-cache entry etc. is ludicrous, and Google lost that one. Another was Perfect 10, a "men's magazine", which had photos from their magazine on their site, presumably to entice people to join the site and/or subscribe to the magazine. Google cached the images and made them available via images.google.com, circumventing the publisher's intent. Google lost that one, too.

The problem with robots.txt and no-cache is that there is no penalty if a search engine decides not to honor it. One shoudn't have to say "don't use this, it's mine" because copyright already covers that. The court decision in Nevada that the cache constitutes fair use is wrong, and I'm sure we'll see more specific cases in the future.

Google has taken this rather narrow ruling to mean that they can now cache ANYTHING, and started scanning copyright books from libraries, which caused several more lawsuits.

That's the Google attitude: we will scan, search, index and cache whatever we want, however we want, and you have to sue us if you don't like it.