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[IP] more on SiliconValley.com - Good Morning Silicon Valley





Begin forwarded message:

From: Jim McCoy <mccoy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: June 30, 2005 8:42:02 PM EDT
To: dave@xxxxxxxxxx
Cc: davidu@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: Re: [IP] more on SiliconValley.com - Good Morning Silicon Valley



On Jun 30, 2005, at 6:07 AM, "David A. Ulevitch" <davidu@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Surely this must be a joke. Any content publisher can block google from crawling and/or caching their site:
[...]
If content publishers are concerned about this then the solution for them is not only trivial but also well published and directly listed on Google's FAQ.


The question that will be raised does seem a bit obvious:

Why do you assume that a content publisher needs to take a pro-active measure to limit copyright infringement?

This is not about publishers not wanting google to crawl their site, it is about publishers not needing to tell google that they cannot infringe upon the publisher's copyright (e.g. cache the content) just because google has the ability to do so. Does the publisher also need to tell StreamCast/Grokster that they do not want their content to be shared on that particular p2p network? Do they need to include statements or special configurations for all potential infringers?

What distinguishes google from others in this space is that they do cache the info in their servers. Google's current policy seems to be that it is easier to beg forgiveness than to ask permission, and the fact that setting no-cache is a bit of per-page metadata (rather than a per-site item that can be set) it is not a large leap to wonder if this might be considered an unreasonable requirement being placed on the content owner. This is a dangerous game for Google to be playing right now...

Jim



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