Using contract to protect more than copyright...
Over at William Patry's copyright blog, he has posted a piece about whether newspaper-article headlines are copyrightable
. He correctly concludes that [h]eadlines are short phrases or titles, and not protectible not only under the regulation, but under hundreds of opinions.
In the comments, I suggest that an adverse ruling may simply lead to more contracts by content creators.
It occurs to me that Google's encroachment in areas that content creators typically considered their own. Of course those areas are also impliedly licensed away to search engines and web end users by virtue of the nature of the internet. However, what if a content creator does not want to impliedly license such rights away? Clearly here one could make the argument that imposing a clickwrap-type license could protect that content for individuals assenting to those terms. The same is not easily said for Google's robots--the things that google uses to search out content and add it to their databases. How could a robot be an agent of Google with authority to assent to the terms and conditions imposed upon content?
Almost since the beginning of the web, content creators could add a robots.txt file to exclude content from search engines. As far as I'm aware, google's robots obey such commands.
This does not entirely address the content owner's dilemma. The problem for content owners is two fold. On the one hand, few would say that want Google to never index--that is add their site's pages to google's search results. On the other hand, those same content creators probably do not want Google to be unjustly enriched by using their content in a way they hadn't expected. As such, adding a robots.txt file would exclude too much, but having nothing permits too much.
I do not believe there is any good solution.
posted by Mike @ 9:30 AM
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