Freedom to Tinker: Will the RIAA Sue Google?
Ed Felten comments on Jacques Distler’s post about the similarity of a search engine such as Google to the tools developed by the four college students who are being pursued by the RIAA’s Uruk Hai legal team.
Another interesting comparison might be to image searching via Google. If you click on one of the images from a search, you will be taken to a page that says, among other things, “This image may be subject to copyright.” Google does not attempt to determine which images may be copyrighted and/or freely used, just as most file searching services wouldn’t attempt to determine the copyright status of an MP3 file. For image files as well as music files, many of the copyright owners may actually be willing to grant permission to others to freely use their creations. Without explicit instructions, such as those provided by a Creative Commons license, it is virtually impossible to automate this.
A search on Tasmanian Devil brings up images of the real animals, as well as images of the Warner Brothers cartoon character. None of the cartoon images were from a Warner Brothers owned website. While Warner Brothers may have more of an issue with the owners of the websites that are displaying images copyrighted by Warner, one might wonder why they don’t take issue with Google for facilitating the spread of these copyrighted images. Google’s role here seems to be very similar to that of at least some of the four college students who were indexing audio and other files via SMB based services.
For the technically curious, the Samba history of SMB indicates that the protocol originated in IBM’s first definition of NetBIOS. The May 2001 issue of Linux Magazine has an excellent article on SMB and Samba.
While Google will cache HTML pages, they don’t seem to cache other things, like MP3 files or the actual images from an image search. Although Google will automatically convert PDF files to HTML, you can’t grab the original PDF file out of the Google cache, at least not as far as I know.
Now, if those students had made their service do something similar, i.e., place a copright disclaimer next to the link to download an MP3 file, then they could argue that they are providing an audio search service similar to Google’s image search service.
They indexed everything, not just MP3 files.
And, as the example in my post demonstrated, you can easily do a similar search on Google and return directories full of MP3 files, with nary a copyright warning in sight.
There’s a reason the DMCA had an exemption for search engines …
Jacques, thanks for pointing out the fact that the students indexed all files. I read through the analysis you linked to while I was rewriting part of what I had written. I went back and added in “indexing audio and other files” in one place, but forgot to emphasize that elsewhere.
Should I sue Google if I stumble upon a page of mine which was cached? It’s a copyright violation after all.
Jacques’ comment suggests that it is not a copyright violation due to an exemption in the DMCA. The search engine company might also argue it is fair use.
There was a recent case where a photographer sued a search engine company over a set of cached thumbnail images of his photographs. The Ninth Circuit of Appeals ruled in favor of the search engine company.
I have no idea how the court would rule on a cache of the full web page. I haven’t heard of anyone sueing a company over that.