Danny Sullivan, Forget Google Print Copyright Infringement; Search Engines Already Infringe, SearchEngineWatch, May 25, 2005. If the AAUP complaint against the Google book digitization project is upheld in court, then search engines are in trouble. Excerpt: 'Let me zero in on a key part of the complaint: "Google's claim that it is fair use to make copies of every copyrighted work in even one major library, let alone three of them, is completely unprecedented in scale; it is tantamount to saying that Google can make copies of every copyrighted work ever published, period." It is not unprecedented at all. It is exactly what search engines have been doing over the past ten years, since they started crawling the web. They are making copies of copyrighted works all the time, billions and billions of them....When search engines index content, they do not formally request permission to do such copying. They just do it. Don't want to be copied? Then you have to stick up a robots.txt file or use the meta robots tag to opt-out. If you don't opt-out, is that tantamount to granting permission? We don't know. The Bidder's Edge case didn't really answer it. Rather than copyright being the issue, it was found to be one of trespass.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/26/2005 10:43:00 AM.
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.
