Jerry Brito

Search, cache, and copyright

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Google has lost its copyright appeal against Belgian newspaper publishers. There seem to be conflicting reports about what exactly Google was found liable for. Here’s the WSJ:

A Belgian court ruled Tuesday that Internet search engine Google Inc. violated Belgian copyright law when it published snippets and links to Belgian newspapers on its Web site without permission.

And here’s the AP:

A Brussels court ruled in favor of Copiepresse, a copyright protection group representing 18 mostly French-language newspapers that complained the search engine’s “cached” links offered free access to archived articles that the papers usually sell on a subscription basis.

Snippets and entire cached pages are very different things. But whatever the case, what this case highlights is how unsettled copyright law is as it applies to search engines (and I’ll limit myself to just the U.S.). As for snippets, sure, there’s Kelly v. Arriba Soft, which found that indexing photographs and displaying their thumbnails is a fair use. But that’s just one circuit’s opinion, which is very persuasive, but not controlling in other circuits. Then there’s Perfect 10 v. Google, which cuts in the opposite direction.

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