>Placing a document on the web does not surrender any copyright
>whatsoever, any more than publishing a document in a book might.
>Technically, by indexing all these pages, search engines are
>violating copyright all over the place--especially those that do
>full-text indexing.
This is a misconception. There is well-established case law for fair use
that is likely to allow this sort of copying. For example, it is perfectly
legal to videotape a movie or television show for the purpose of
time-shifting. The big tests of infringement are the nature and purpose of
the copy and the effect of the copy on the value of the work. Rather
obviously, one would think, the copies generated by robots, cacheing
proxies, etc., are legal under these tests. The differences among nations
who are Berne Convention signatories (which is most of the nations of the
world) are not very big.
There are other, much grayer copyright issues brought up by the net. This
one isn't worth worrying about. If a major court found that those sorts of
copies are infringements, we should be worrying about the decline of
civilization, not copyright law... ;-)
Nick
---------------------------------------
Verity Inc.
Connecting People with Information
Product Manager, Categorization and Visualization
408-542-2164; home office 408-369-1233; fax 408-541-1600
http://www.verity.com
_________________________________________________
This messages was sent by the robots mailing list. To unsubscribe, send mail
to robots-request@webcrawler.com with the word "unsubscribe" in the body.
For more info see http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/robots.html