The Google cache provides free access to a huge part of the historical internet, including back issues of newspapers and other periodicals for which publishers would now like to charge access tolls. I first wrote about the potential for copyright conflicts in FOSN for 11/9/01. Now Stefanie Olsen writes that many publishers are awakening to the power of the Google cache to undermine their business models. Search engine guru Danny Sullivan predicts that the permissibility of the Google cache will eventually be tested in court. (PS: When it is, I hope the court understands that the Google crawler politely respects all robot.txt requests to exclude the site. In this sense, all cached sites are consenting or incompetent.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 7/10/2003 04:12:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
