Electronic Frontier Foundation – January 25, 2006:

A district court in Nevada has ruled that the Google Cache is a fair use. Blake Field, an author and attorney, brought the copyright infringement lawsuit against Google after the search engine automatically copied and cached a story he posted on his website. The district court found that Mr. Field “attempted to manufacture a claim for copyright infringement against Google in hopes of making money from Google’s standard [caching] practice.” Google responded that its Google Cache feature, which allows Google users to link to an archival copy of websites indexed by Google, does not violate copyright law.

It’s an interesting opinion because it puts the burden squarely on the copyright holder, exactly where it should be. The Court determined that because the plaintiff failed to protect his site with the “no archive” metatag and specifically used the “allow all” robot.txt header, Google had every right to cache it. However, because no statute requires a copyright holder to opt out of infringement, I wouldn’t be surprised if this gets overturned.