Do Search Engines Infringe Copyright?
Let’s start with the copyright issues raised by the real-life Google News – which is a component of the hypothetical Googlezon. (In a prior column, I explained why Google News enjoys legal protection against defamation – but did not discuss its protection, if any, against copyright liability.) When Google displays news items — in the form of search results containing some text from a given site, plus a link to that site — does it infringe their copyrights? First, do the links infringe copyright? Probably not. As I pointed out in an earlier column, the legal status of linking isn’t settled – but ought to be. When it is settled, however, it seems very likely courts will see links as being mere pointers — much like non-copyright-infringing citations. A nonfiction book’s reference section is hardly a host of copyright infringement; neither are links. But what about the material that accompanies the links: chunks of text taken from the site itself? (In this sense, Google acts not only as
