Another United States cache-copyright case. This time, Judge Surrick of the federal circuit dealt with cached copies of Usenet materials.

Google’s archiving of Usenet posts does not constitute copyright infringement, even if the posts themselves contain infringing material. The case revolved around excerpts from ‘The Seduction Library’, a series of guides from Snodgrass Publishing on how to score with women. Gordon Roy, owner of the company, had sued Google for copyright infringement because the search giant had archived posts he had made to Usenet containing parts of his guide. In addition, Roy said that Google’s caching and returning snippets of text from his website in response to searches also constituted infringement.

What is interesting about Roy v Google is that this time the decision turned on a characterisation of Google as an Internet Service Provider (‘ISP’). According to Judge Surrick, the automatic caching mechanism allowed Google to take advantage of ISP safe harbour provisions. This is an approach that could potentially apply in Australia.