Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Just keep saying "Fair Use! Fair Use!", and hope it works :-).

Fair use is not the issue here. Anyone who claims someone else's work as his own should be liable. Bloggers, like everyone else, need to provide proper attribution to work they're referring to.

Can I criticize Google? They disturb me, how they use and cache my site's content, but have a Terms of Service (please read) that makes it a violation for me to scrape their content or use it for commercial purposes. (The prohibition of commercial use applies to their API, Orkut, their groups, their search engine, everything). How can a social entrepreneur be self-sustaining by being non-commercial? Yes, sure, I can set my robots.txt to exclude myself, but is that a realistic choice when they have a monopoly position? It seems a very unequal relationship. They built an empire out of a myriad of these tiny inequalities. I feel that the web is much more important than an operating system (there's only one web out there) and so I feel much more creepy about Google than I do about Microsoft. David, please help!

Google is in a position where they could do mighty damage, but by and large I think they've behaved admirably. (Insert the relevant exceptions here: ____________.) But why should Google be obliged to let you use its tech, infrastructure and data for free so you can make money with it? Isn't that the type of thing that one company pays another company for?

Who owns Orkut data is a separate issue.

Caching is a weird issue, I agree, but I was glad the US courts decided it wasn't an infringement...not because I have a strong opinion on the principles involved but simply because the cache is sometimes useful.