Yes. We've talked about this before and seen some very different opinions. But basically Google operates solely on the fact that it ignores copyrights. Look at a page in the Google cache, if it says copyright somewhere on that page then Google are breaking copyright laws. End of Story.
Illegaly copied material? - Look at the bottom of the page: "All Content © V7 Internet Marketing"
Of course v7n or anyone else aren't going to complain because Google provides traffic, and even if they do wish to complain they can use robots.txt
to exclude the Google spiders from caching their site. This has always been Googles defence.
However, it still doesn't change the fact that Google's primary search facilities operate with the use of Copyrighted material. The absence of a robots.txt exclusion is assumed by Google to be equivalent to "express permission" by the site owners to use that material. Legally its not.
This case in Belgium was bought because Google used a news source without express permission of the site owner. Google as it always does - assumed that they could use the material because the site owner hadn't excluded their robots. The court found otherwise. Prooving (as if it needed prooving) the case that an "absence of restriction" isn't the same as "express permission".
A brief look at Googles attempts to make
books available for search reveals the extent of the controversy. In effect, exactly the same laws apply. However the print industry does not think that it will benefit in the same way that website owners do, and so they are using basic copyright laws to prevent Google from indexing their copyrighted material for the financial benefit of Google. 'Brazen violation' is a typical comment about Googles indifference to the appicable laws.
Possibly, had the laws been applied in the same way to online content at Googles inception we would now be looking at a very different internet.
I personally believe that we would be far better off having a positive instead of a negative robots.txt exclusion policy whereby the robots.txt file was a list of allowed spiders and robots. Website owners would then have much more control over their content and how it is used.
Of course in this world, big business has priority over the lay man, and we all now to some extent "need" Google. Of course all this has had the effect that Google now has a huge amount of control over the web. Nearly all webmasters SEO their sites according to how they believe Google (and other se's) define a "Good website". If Google radically changes its policies tomorrow then you can be sure that the day afterwards you are looking at a radically different internet.
I also believe that this has led to Google "getting away" with things like Adsense, which - lets face it - has only been bad for the web. However people are reticent to "bite the hand that feeds them".
And so Google - for all its inovation - and its very public statement "Do no evil", needs to be closely watched, as anyone or any business with a great deal (some say "too much") influence in a particular business arena or industry.
