Lawyer Article

What rights does a robot have? Apparently more than some people thought. A United States federal rules recently held that the robot search routines used by Google have an implied license to copy many web pages into a cache for later access by internet surfers, and that such activity is otherwise not a standard copyright violation and is protected by the safe harbor provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The U.S. Federal District Court in Nevada ruled in the case of Field vs. Google that Google’s caching of the plaintiff’s web site information did not violate copyright laws. The plaintiff had not claimed that standard “Googlebot” infringed on his copyrights when it make initial copies of his site like any ordinary user would make when viewing his site. Instead, he claimed that Google infringed his rights whenever a Google user clicked on a “cached link” to the plaintiff’s material offered on Google’s search site.

The court found that Google was a passive participant in this process, because it is the user, not Google, who makes the alleged infringing act. The court held that Google’s copying and distribution of the Plaintiff’s work was “fair use”, permitted under copyright laws, in part because Google use transformed the information from the plaintiff’s site by allowing users to access the information when the plaintiff’s site is not accessible.

Google’s treatment of the cached pages was also noted favorably by the court, observing “In its search results, at the top of each listing, Google prominently features a link to the original Web page. By contrast, when “Cached” links are displayed, they are in a smaller font, and in a less conspicuous location.” Also, Google provided a “prominent disclaimer” at the top of the page explaining that what is being viewed is merely a snapshot of the page. Google’s status as a commercial entity did not negate these factors.

The court also held that the plaintiff had granted an implied license to Google to copy these works into cache and allow other people to view the works there. The plaintiff knew of several easy tools to keep the Googlebots away from copying his web pages, but he did not use these tools. Instead, he left the information out on his website for anyone to view or cache. Making your information available to the widest possible audience for free acts as an implied license to copy that work in the standard methods of web search engines.

Also, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act states that a “service provider shall not be liable for monetary relief . . . for infringement of copyright by reason of the intermediate and temporary storage of material on a system or network controlled or operated by or for the service provider.” The court found that this safe harbor provision protects Google’s site cache.