Google wins another copyright case

An appeals court in Pennsylvania has affirmed a lower court's dismissal of a lawsuit against Google. The lawsuit was filed by Gordon Roy Parker, a writer who claimed the search giant infringed on his copyright by archiving a Usenet posting of his and providing excerpts from his Web site in search results. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania ruled over a year ago that under case law, Google's activities were akin to those of an Internet Service Provider and thus did not constitute copyright infringement by automatically archiving a copy of the Usenet posting. In a decision handed down this week, the appellate court for that same district affirmed that ruling.

[My2Cents4U]

I feel the court's decision is wrong

As far as I unterstand international copyright lex a text written and denoted by having an author is fully protected by copyright laws. It's subject to the author solely to stop any publishing of their text at any time.

I cannot understand why the Court didn't follow this interpretation. Well, perhaps this decision may serve as a leading case for any other kinds of publishing. A song being broadcast may be broadcast further on without the consent of the author. Or a potatoe being designed and patented by an industrial company may be grown even without the consent of that designing company... Hmmm, good news, everyone!

[canckaer]

Oh please

If you post something on USENET, your posting is automatically in the public domain. Google is just a means to an end, it's a search-engine for crying out loud.
And although the American justice system can be very slow sometimes, they are showing a lot of common sense in this case.
A patented potatoe? Give me a break!

[TerrinBell]

You feel, but what do you think?

You obviously haven't read the DMCA, which is what the lawsuit
is all about. The author's work is protected. However, ISP
providers are also protected under the DMCA for unintentional
copyright infringement provided the author informs the ISP of
the infringement and the ISP promptly removes the infringing
material. I'd also say Google is protected under traditional Fair-
use copyright principles.

If this weren't the case, any time a user of a forum, such as this
one, posted some copyrighted material, the owner of the forum
would be liable.

[smilin:)]

Usenet = public domain

It's in the public domain