Reader Comments on Aardvark Daily 22 March 2002
Note: the comments below are the unabridged
submissions of readers and do
not necessarily reflect the opinions of the publisher.
From: Sam Wallace For : The Editor (for publication) Subj: google Am rather suprised to hear you would not expect religious organisations to welcome scrutiny - assuming you were serious - I would expect the Moonies to attempt to silence critics but am astonished and disappointed that google agreed to remove the links. Google should have a disclaimer on the front page stating that many relevant search results could be omitted as they are too timid to honestly list the available pages. Sure they could follow some standard ethics when listing sites e.g. those grounded in law like kiddie porn sites but if the Moonies are going to make all the claims they do and expect google to link to them then they should expect the links to critics also. As for your notion of potential copyright infringement when google caches web pages, it would seem to me that there is little difference between google's caching and the average surfer. What happens when surfing? A copy of the web page i.e. html, txt, images etc is downloaded and stored on the local machine. So the surfer now has an identical copy of the web page in their own possession. They have reproduced the original. Now this can be made available via one's net connection to anyone else e.g. some P2P apps have made the contents of entire hard drives available to anyone else running a similar app. But the point is that this is how the system works; when one publishes a web page they should be aware that when others access the page their local machine will be copying all published data. If I visit the M$ site I'll have the M$ logo in 'temp internet files' on my own computer. Am I breaking the law? I think there are a lot of aspects that could be discussed; in the meantime I think the best thing google could do would be to remove all links to the 'Church' of Scientology as well as the cached pages. After all, their claims contradict the Xenu site...maybe xenu should threaten google...? Aardvark responds Note that it doesn't seem to be Google's caching that is at issue here. They could kill the cached copies without pulling the links but they didn't.Hit Reload For Latest Comments
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