Parker claims
that by making cached copies of his websites available to their users, both
Yahoo and Microsoft republish his works in their entirety without his
permission. Accordingly, Parker has brought several claims against both
defendants, including direct copyright infringement, contributory copyright
infringement and vicarious copyright infringement.
Sound
familiar? In
Field v. Google, Inc., the United States
District Court for the District of Nevada considered a case that is
strikingly similar to the present one: Field, an author of copyrighted works
published online at his website, sued Google in copyright for creating and
storing cached versions of his works as they appeared on his website. Field
was also aware that he could have opted out of being included in Google's
searches by including "no-archive" HTML "meta-tags" on his web page.
Nonetheless, he brought a claim of direct copyright infringement against
Google for violating his exclusive right to reproduce and distribute copies
of his works. Among other defenses, Google asserted that the plaintiff had
impliedly licensed Google to reproduce his work because he had consciously
chosen not to include the no-archive meta-tag on the pages of his website.
The court concluded that Google had sufficiently established the defense of
implied license.
The district court in Parker followed this reasoning.
From Parker's silence and lack
of earlier objection, the defendants could properly infer that Parker knew
of and encouraged the search engines' activity, and, as did the defendants
in Field, they could reasonably interpret Parker's conduct to be a
grant of a license for that use.
But in the end the Court did not dismiss the direct copyright infringement
claim, because the defandants allegedly have continued to display Parker's
works after the commencement of the lawsuit. This might constitute direct infringement,
because the licence might have been revoked.