Another United States cache-copyright case. This time, Judge Surrick of the federal circuit dealt with cached copies of Usenet materials. The complaint alleged that Google had infringed the plaintiff’s copyright by archiving posts which the company’s own director, Mr Roy, originally made to Usenet which contained parts of his publications. Roy also argued that caching and returning text ‘snippets’ from the website in response to search queries was an infrignement.
What is interesting about Roy v Google is that this time the decision turned on a characterisation of Google as an Internet Service Provider (‘ISP’). According to Judge Surrick, the automatic caching mechanism allowed Google to take advantage of ISP safe harbour provisions. This is an approach that could potentially apply in Australia.
