Quote:
Originally Posted by dstampe
(Interestingly, many Web pages have a copyright notice--is Google pirating the pages it caches? I haven't heard of anything so far, so there must be some legal loophole for them)
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This is a complicated issue. Fact is, to some degree some institutions do have a right to archieve things (like internet archive) and archiving is to some degree a fundamental personal right that needs to protected, as DRM mechanisms endanger it quite fundamentally. However keep in mind to have the right to archive something, you of course ever had to had at least some right to have had it first place... you know what I mean? You cannot legally archieve anything you should never have been able to see first place.... The second issue is showing others the contents of your archieve... this is quite troublesome, I think some public institutions like public libraries (of all sorts) have extra rights to archieve things, and to make it accessible to their customers (the people). An internet example is the internet archieve.
Google on one hand, had obviously the right to view the pages (which does not analog to your torrents!) and thus has the right to archieve them. However notice it would not include their right to make the pages viewable by you...
On another hand the web, the http protocol originally was never designed to be a pure server-client transmission like it is used 99% of the time today. It was originally designed to rely heavily on a whole string of proxies, where each proxy could store all kind of data. However since bandwidth costs lowered much faster than data, and since increasing desire of dynamic data instead of static proxies are a more already curiosity today.
Well end-result, if you put this into your html header, google will not provide a cache link for your side...
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOARCHIVE">
So they argue, if anybody has a problem with them providing people a cache versions, you can turn this off. Its an "opt out" solution