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Originally Posted by 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.
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Sure, those were specific cases of subscriber content. That's different from caching publicly available content. There was a similar case in Belgium. A content provider had articles available for free on their website for a limited time. Google cached the free articles, which wasn't a problem. However, the company also takes older content off of it's website and places it into a seperate archive. It then charges customers for access to the archive. They sued Google, saying that because the content was no longer publicly available, and only open to subscribers, that Google should not be allowed to offer it for free. The judge agreed.
However, the funny thing is that the judge didn't impose a penalty on Google. Rather, he said that Google should take content down if the original website requests that they do so. Which was actually Google's policy all along.
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The problem with robots.txt and no-cache is that there is no penalty if a search engine decides not to honor it.
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Do you know of any search engines that don't honor it?
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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.
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It's not just Google, it's all search engines. That's how they work. If you want to retain privacy over your content, then don't post it on an open web site.