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Original Title: Google
following the previous CNET article, this article, from which l copied a small portion, summarized Googles legal challenges.
Google and the courts
A number of organizations (most controversially the
Church of Scientology) have used the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act to demand that Google remove references to allegedly
copyrighted material on other sites. Google typically handles this by removing the link as requested and including a link to the complaint in the search results. There have also been complaints that the “Google cache” feature violates copyright. However, the consensus seems to be that caching is a normal part of the functionality of the web, and that
HTTP provides adequate mechanisms for requesting that caching be disabled (which Google respects; it also honors the
robots.txt file). In
2002, news reports surfaced that the Google search engine had been banned in
China. A mirror site (in all respects, including mirrored text) called
elgooG proved useful to get around the ban. The ban was later lifted, and reports indicated that it was not Google itself that was targeted. Rather, Google´s feature of a cached version of a website would allow Chinese users to circumvent any ban of a website itself, merely by visiting the cache instead. There is also a dynamic Google mirror working as a
proxy server at http://www.zensur.freerk.com/google/ . Google´s efforts to refine its database has led to some legal controversy, drawing a lawsuit in October 2002 from a company, SearchKing, that sought to sell advertisements on pages with inflated Google rankings. In its defense, Google said that its rankings are its constitutionally protected opinions of the web sites that it lists. A judge threw out SearchKing´s lawsuit in mid-2003 on precisely these grounds.
[1] [1] In late
2003 and early
2004, there were persistent rumors that Google would be sued by the
SCO Group over its use of the
Linux operating system, in conjunction with SCO´s
lawsuit against IBM over the ownership of
intellectual property rights relating to Linux.
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