Stephen Kellett writes: | In message <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, John Chambers | <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes | >Actually, doing that would be not just feasible; it would be easy, | >except for that one little elephant hiding over there in the corner: | >Copyright. | | OK, so how do Google get away with storing all those cached web pages | (just about all of which are copyright someone else) on their search | farm?
Well, the basic answer to this is that they grew to be Big Guys before anyone in authority realized what they're doing. And there's a sub-answer: They don't in fact cache everything. They routinely back down and remove things when a copyright owner complains. The copies of google in different countries suppress different things, depending on local law. Google is big enough and successful enough to pay staff to handle this sort of thing. Also, google could probably afford an occasional $100,000 fine for a violation. For that matter, Microsoft is being fined $600,000,000 (or is that Euros?), and to them it's small change, much less than the profits from the business practices that they're being fined for. If you've got enough money, it's legal. Actually, an interesting sort of "compliance" on google's part has lately come to light. Several web sites sent them letters demanding that they remove links under the terms of the DMCA. Google's response was to replace the links with links to their copy of the lawyers' letters. Those letters, of course, all state explicitly what URLs google is required to not link to. The URLSs are there in the text, just not as hyperlinks. People who see this are getting a good laugh out of it. And the laws seem to be on google's side, because the laws seem to agree that a letter belongs to the recipient, not the sender. | I don't know the answer, its not a trick question - but surely the | answer to that question must be useful to your problem as well. At the | end of the day theirs is a text search engine and yours is a tune search | engine. Must be some parallels surely? The parallels are pretty obvious. But they might not be relevant. If you have the money, you can get away with things that the rest of us can't. To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
