More from Rogers Cadenhead on Google and copyright

I missed the bigger question Rogers Cadenhead was asking re: Google Library and copyright when I just read his response in my comments and hadn't seen his fuller post on it.

I think we've all seen that the internet and technology speed well ahead of the courts and legislative process. And when the courts and legislators race to catch up, it's either a knee-jerk reaction or caving to business interests (DMCA) at the expense of existing rights.

I'm sure there have been case-law decisions that explain why Google can make a copy of a copyrighted web site on their servers in the process of making an index without getting prior permission from the copyright holder (Google respects robot.txt files but that's a form of opt-out not opt-in and I'm argiuing that opt-out is a legal failing for Google library) but I can't say why that is. It's only common sense that you can, otherwise even things like the local cache in your web browser would be illegal. Or even storing the bits needed in memory to make up the page on your screen while you are reading it would be illegal. Which would be about as dumb as, oh, let's see, someone suing to prevent linking to pages inside their site other than the home page or to prevent ISPs from cacheing their pages to improve performance to users. And neither one of those could ever happen. (Am I dripping with enough sarcasm here or do I need to lay it on thicker?)

To to be safe, I recommend we all shut off our web browsers though until this gets sorted out. See you in another life!