LBi Search: Google to be exempt from copyright law?

Lord Lucas' proposed amendments to the Digital economy Bill would see search engines granted a license to copy and re-publish content legally without risk of litigation.

An amendment proposed by Lord Lucas to the UK Digital Economy Bill, the brainchild of Lord Mandelson currently going through the British legislative process, seeks to grant search engines including Google the right to a “standing and non-exclusive license [...] to make a copy of some or all of the content” of any website not presenting a “machine-readable file”. We assume the “machine readable file” to be a reference to the industry standard ‘robots.txt’ file, specified by the robots exclusion protocol.

This is in the face of recent comments made by publishing mogul Rupert Murdoch, whom as Forbes.com reported in November “wants a Google rebellion” and alludes to the suggestion that the re-publication of content within search results amounts to theft. Venture Beat highlighted a Sky News video that makes interesting viewing in which Murdoch elaborates on his views.

The amendment has been proposed in order to ensure that search engines can continue to operate and innovate in British territories free from the threat of legal action from copyright owners over content copied by search engines in the course of their operations.

Suing search engines for copyright theft is unlikely to benefit anyone in the long term. It could potentially cause a great deal of grief if anyone were to actually be successful in seeking damages from search engines for copyright theft. News aggregation services and journalists may fall foul of this too, as they also republish snippets and quote news from online sources.

Given that the proposed amendments include a method to legally prevent the use of copyright material at the owner’s discretion, it is my opinion that this is a positive proposal, as it reflects, upholds and protects current accepted practices in a reasonable and workable manner.

2 Comments

Posted on 22nd January 2010 at 10:31 pm by Dixon Jones

I disagree. It's not a positive amendment. The robots.txt protocol was an adhoc system, initially created by a search engine called webcrawler, as I recall. It has no basis in law. So a search engine does not have to obey it. But even if it did, to be expressly protected from prosecution sounds absurd. It would appear the French and the Germans feel the same way, based on recent legal arguments.

Were you able you able to find out if the amendment was carried? I tried to google it... As the vote was on Monday, but no joy. Would love to know.

Posted on 25th January 2010 at 12:54 pm by Simon Howland

Hi Dixon,

Not sure as of yet. The next sitting is tomorrow, so will keep my ears peeled (Note the presence of RSS on this page: http://bit.ly/6LaKcD).

My reason for suggesting the amendment is positive is that it attempts to protect search engines from lengthy litigation in which nobody will be a winner in the long term.

A publisher who cannot perceive any benefit from the services search engines offer should be able to take action to remove their sites from search engines, not to allow the search engines to index their sites and then to sue them.

While no reference is made to 'robots.txt' in the bill, there is currently no other mechanism I am aware of which is widely supported and can denote freely available material as 'not for crawling', so this would be a good bet for legal purposes.

France and Germany should follow this path, not fight copyright lawsuits which could ultimately result in the loss of access to the services of search engines. Where would they be then?

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Google to be exempt from copyright law?