Search engines illegal?

[SilverBlade]

http://www.globetechnology.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20050712.gtgoogle0712/BNStory/Technology/

Another reason why humans are devolving mentally while our technology is evolving.

[ukb007]

Shooting the messenger rather than the actual copyright infringer. It's a strange world we're heading for.

Thanks.

[adam]

Bah, this is one of those articles that tech sites publish when there's no actual news that week. Its tentative language in a tenative bill that would only affect Canadian citizens, and at worst all it means is that if your work is being hosted on an archiving site like waybackmachine, then you can contact them and request they remove it, just like you could have done to the host of the original site at the time it was archived. If they don't comply you can force them to through a court order. And even this is only if you really read things into the language of the bill.

Its not like this could, in any way, be used to try to get rid of search enginges or sue them for money damages.

[BJ_M]

it is not even law yet and will go through several revisions .. as adam mentioned , it was a stupid article..

the issue is really how search engines handle robots.txt files ...

google (and others) has ignored them so far and indexs / archives anyway

[thecoalman]

the issue is really how search engines handle robots.txt files ...

google (and others) has ignored them so far and indexs / archives anyway

I've never had a reason to ban google or any other search engine so I don't know from experience but I was my understanding that Google did follow the robots.txt file. I know that in the past at one point I had htaccess set up to prevent hot linking and every image I had on that site dropped out of their images index.

[BJ_M]

they got sued because sometimes they didnt follow the robots.txt

[thecoalman]

they got sued because sometimes they didnt follow the robots.txt

Law like this is clearly a good idea if the intention is to get the search engines to follow the wishes of the site owner. I've never heard Google mentioned as not following the robots.txt file but I have seen site owners mentioning other search engines not following it. I'd be more concerned about bandwidth than copyright issues, if you were a small site with limited bandwidth and a large collection of images then it could really become a problem .

[BJ_M]

archive.org was also sued for the same reason ... last week ..

i think in the google case, google won or it was thrown out or something because you never anything more on it ,,,,


the archive.org case is pretty weird -