Re: Australian law and Browsing the Web

On 97-04-01, Timothy Arnold-Moore <tja[_at_]mds.rmit.edu.au> wrote:
>
> Given that the Internet has used caching since before there was a
> World Wide Web, what forms of caching do you consider to be outside
> the bounds of the implied licence? If proxy servers are beyond the
> implied licence then the Internet would collapse under the load.
>
> Indexing services which substantially reproduce a page or set of
> pages (as opposed to those which simply point to a page) are likely
> to infringe but I fail to see how a cache (if that is all it is) can
> be beyond the implied licence.

It seems to me that caching done on an individuals computer would be covered by an implied license. In contrast, it strikes me that when entities such as AOL cache entire sites so that subsequent users of AOL don't ever actually make it to the original site [which perhaps will have updated content such as may be the case in for a news reporting site], but rather view the site as it was cached sometime earlier by AOL would not be covered by an implied license.

I don't know enough about the way the internet works to be truly convinced of my response. One concern I have with your response is that even if the internet widely used caching prior to the WWW, can we charge current web publishers with knowledge of that fact sufficient to conclude that they intended to allow the practice to continue with their own newly posted material?

Bob Penn
<thresshold[_at_]aol.com> Received on Sun Apr 06 1997 - 14:30:41 GMT