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Legal Issues

by Mike Masnick

Wed, Apr 17th 2002 10:57am





German Company Suing Google

from the oh,-come-on dept

This is getting ridiculous. A German train company is now suing Google because a search on Google can find information on how to sabotage their trains. The company has already gone after the ISP that had that info online and forced them to take it down. Yet, they're still going after Google, because they say the "links" still exist. Of course, by drawing attention to this with a lawsuit, they are almost guaranteeing that the information will be copied and mirrored in so many places it will be impossible to get rid of. By the end of the week, they're expected to sue Yahoo! and AltaVista as well. This is ridiculous. These are search engines that are designed to search the internet. They haven't done anything wrong. If the company believes the info is damaging they should (as they have) go after whoever put that info online - but the search engines have nothing to do with that. Update: Google is now in negotiations to stop the lawsuit and say they might remove the links.

2 Comments | Leave a Comment..


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  1.  

    It's not the hyperlink, but the cached page

    identicon
    Mark, Apr 17th, 2002 @ 11:16am

    I think the real problem is the cached versin of the page, not the outdated hyperlinks. I've always thought that Google was somewhat in the wrong for maintained copies of other authors' materials.

    "Google not only offers a hyperlink, but also has the Web pages with the articles in question in cache, allowing a user to view them on the Google Web site, Schreyer noted."

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]

  2.  

    Re: It's not the hyperlink, but the cached page

    identicon
    mhh5, Apr 17th, 2002 @ 5:32pm

    google cache is one of google's best features. I'm not so sure about its legality, but I hope no one sues google to eliminate google's cache!

    maybe they get away with it b/c it's covered by fair use? I mean google doesn't just reprint the page, but annotates it so that you can find where your search terms are on the page.

    I really need to brush up on my fair-use laws....

    [ reply to this | link to this | view in thread ]


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