Getting back to Field, for reasons not entirely clear (although certain gold-digging innuendos have been made), Field registered his poems with the Copyright Office, posted them to his website without including exclusory metatags or robots.txt file commands, found them in the Google cache, and filed the lawsuit for copyright infringement. The theory put forth by Field is that when a user clicks on the ‘Cached’ link for his website, Google is creating and distributing copies of his works.
This is somewhat tortured logic since the copy has already been made and is residing in Google’s cache. When a user clicks on the ‘Cached’ link, the user is causing a copy of the work to be downloaded to the user’s browser, but there is no allegation from Field that users accessing the cache are infringing, nor were there allegations that Google was liable for contributory infringement or vicarious liability (which certainly would have been a stronger argument), or even that the original insertion of the work into the Google cache constituted direct copyright infringement.
Google responded that users clicking on the ‘Cached’ link does not constitute direct copyright infringement on behalf of Google, and that even if it did, Google would still not be liable under the following theories: 1) Implied License; 2) Estoppel; 3) Fair Use; and 4) Safe Harbor under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
The URL identifies the location of the website, and also contains a hyperlink to the underlying website. If Google has indexed the website, it will show the Size of the site in kilobytes. Similar pages link is a hyperlink to another result set which is constrained to web pages that fall into the same general category as the selected result.
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