Google Cache is Legal, Official!

I see. So we have reached the time when a complete copy of a work is "fair use". Sounds like a lawsuit in the making.

well, if upheld or reinforced by other rulings this might put the burden of active defense and policing on the copyright. and, to me, this seems to be the crux of the publishers' lawsuit about book-scanning --so it might weaken their case.

sounds like Google has a judge in their pocket.

From this moment on please cease and desist all use of the term 'web scraper' to describe someone who copies the content of other people's pages. The correct term is Information Archivist, thank you for your compliance and cooperation. ;-)

Google cache isn't the issue, the fact that Google let's people scrape that cache from their site is the issue. I could easily use a crawler to download every cached page from a specific web site that would be blocked from doing the same thing on my site.

If Google only showed relevant cache snippets around the search words and not the whole page I wouldn't have a problem their cache. It should direct them to go the the web site for the complete copy.

Stupid lawyer.

Can someone "cache" a copy of this week's 24 on their server that I missed? Thanks.

Google's cache is the real issue IMO. They're completely republishing other's written work on their site, without permissions. As others have noted, there's little difference between this and full scraping. Mind if I scrape your blog and republish it verbatim on mine site, even if I mask it with a 'cache' link? Having read your blog, I'm guessing you do mind :).

Now all they have to do is 'cache' people's books, and voila, that whole ugly Google publisher problem goes away.

Assuming a site owner wants their pages to be found by people using a search engine, would you be ok with having the SE cache the page as long as they didn't make that cached copy available to the public?

Besides, if I visit your page, it's cached by my computer too, albeit in a different way. If you then hack my computer (this is not an invitation) and find your content in my cache could you then claim I've stolen from you?

Feel free to republish my blog, it's full of cursing just to stop the scraping MFAs as the only idiot I've found so far has PSAs anywhere my blog content appears.

I really don't find Google cache as offensive as Google serves a purpose and brings me money. What I find offensive is OTHER people violating my copyright and/or stealing it second hand from Google that DON'T bring me any money.

Google isn't the destination and are the gateway to the destination which is why I tolerate their scraping my site. They may make some money along the way but they are also willing to share the wealth and we both make out like bandits.

However, those that just steal for the sake of stealing, to be the sole destination with no links back to me are the real problem.

For what it's worth I've been completely knocked out of Google for 3 months and my link network sustained most of the traffic so for me it's a willing partnership for 30% of my traffic, but the fact that they don't protect that information on THEIR end was the reason I stopped them from caching it.

Don't get me wrong, if the scrape is beneficial, I let it happen.

If the scrape isn't beneficial, I block it.

Doesn't make me wrong, it makes me selective.

Did you do this before or after you got knocked out?

When I blocked caching is when I saw a lot of cache pages usddenly showing up as the referrer coming from a few IP addresses - put two and two together and came up with HOLY CRAP!