Is Google violating copyright law?

SearchEngineWatch reported on a Belgium newspaper suing Google with the headline:

Belgian Newspapers Want $77.5 million in Damages from Google

Interesting.  I’m not a lawyer, but I am familiar with the Berne copyright convention where almost everything created privately and originally after April 1, 1989 is copyrighted and protected whether it has a copyright notice or not. What this means is that anything created is automatically copyrighted.

I mean, what would you think if you found another site copied your website word for word, image for image? Wouldn’t you think that would be a copyright infringement? Well, Google does that all the time through their caching of websites:

Brad Templeton has an interesting post on the subject of copyright.  He makes a point of some of the exceptions, such as making one copy of music does not violate copyright laws, whereas the mass copying through a file sharing software does violate copyright. So, would Google’s caching of sites fall into the latter area of “mass copying?”

This decision on caching would affect other sites such as the Wayback Machine. This site caches old versions of websites, so would be very similar to Google’s caching.

Here’s another thing: it was a newspaper that brought the suit. Newspapers follow a business model of providing the latest news articles everyday, and for internet news sites this means every hour and even every minute. Newspapers also publish corrections and retractions. Having an older version of their news stories for those reasons can be seen as very negative from their point of view.

 Now, some people have the view that Google is doing this newspaper site a service by driving traffic to them. But is caching a site part of offering relevant results from a search? I think not. I think it’s added value that Google offers. But to what end? The web is a dynamic, changing place where webpages get dropped and added to - all the time. Google caches pages in order to always have something to display from it’s results - even if what it displays is days or weeks old. Having dead ends in their search results would not look good from their business perspective. But flagrantly violating copyright without express permission of the owners beats down a path - to what exactly? I think it infringes upon the rights of the owners. Google takes the stance that it is up to the owners of websites to opt-out, either via a robots.txt ‘disallow’ entry or some other method. My view that it is really Google’s responsibility to ask permission before caching websites. I can imagine that their response would be: well, that’s really too hard to do. Well, boo hoo, Big Goo. I guess that’s why they call it work.

Google runs roughshod over the newspaper website’s copyright in the name of ‘added value,’ mandating their right to do so. They profit by offering results, even if those results are considered outdated by the original owners of the sites. For a company that prides itself on ’doing no evil,’ this seems to be on the border. I think that it is well within the rights of the Belgium newspapers to assert their copyright of their original work - now we’ll see how the legal establishment sees it.