Protection of Personal Data and Copyrighted Material on the Web: The Cases of Google and Internet Archive

Abstract

This article analyzes what presently constitutes one of the most problematic aspects of search engines' and Internet archives' practices: the protection of personal data and copyrighted material. These issues are often sidelined in favour of the quickest possible development of ever more fashionable e-services. Yet the lack of consideration for these issues may hinder the development of various e-services as all kinds of legal claims and suits may be brought against service providers, particularly in the European Union, which is fond of drafting complex legislation in the field. This paper shows how typical search engines and Internet archives work and the legal issues to which their practices give rise. The examples used are Google and Internet Archive, and their policies. It is argued that many of the legal checks and balances they offer with respect to the protection of personal data and copyrighted material leave a great deal to be desired. The article concludes by providing a short list of possible remedies that could, at least provisionally, alleviate some of the most urgent problems.

Notes

Yahoo! Inc. v. La Ligue Contre Le Racisme et L'Antisemitisme (N.D. Cal. 2001) 169 F. Supp. 2d 1181, discussed in G. R. Ferrera, S. D. Lichtenstein, M. E. K. Reder, R. C. Bird & W. T. Schiano, CyberLaw Text and Cases (Mason, OH, Thomson South-Western West, 2004), pp. 37 – 39; See also S. Brin & L. Page (1997) ‘The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine’ in: H. Ashman & P. Thistlewaite (Eds), Proceedings of the 7th International World Wide Web Conference, Brisbane, Australia. Special issue of Computer Networks and ISDN Systems, 30, pp. 107 – 117; C. Reed & J. Angel (2004) Computer Law, 5th edn (Oxford, Oxford University Press), pp. 390ff.

Brin & Page, ‘Anatomy of a large-scale search engine’.

For a discussion on some of these points, see, e.g., G. Crowell & S. Thurow (2002) Search Engines and Legal Issues, Second Part. Special report from the Search Engine Strategies 2002 Conference, 12 – 14 August, San Jose, CA. Available online at: http://searchenginewatch.com/searchday/article.php/2161051. See Ferrera et al., CyberLaw Text and Cases, p. 73ff, for an account of Playboy Enterprises Inc. v. Welles (9th Cir. 2002) 162 F.3d 1169, where the defendant put the third party's trademarks in the metatags of her page, thus free-riding on the third party's intellectual property.

Directive 95/46/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 24 October 1995 on the protection of individuals with regard to the processing of personal data and on the free movement of such data (Official Journal L 281, 23/11/1995, pp. 0031 – 0050).

A&M Records, Inc., et al. v. Napster, Inc. (9th Cir. 2001), 239 F.3d 1004. For a description of the case, see Ferrera et al., CyberLaw Text and Cases, pp. 103ff; and for the equivalent legal position in the United Kingdom, see R. Wegenek (Ed. (2002) E-Commerce: A Guide to the Law of Electronic Business, 3rd edn (London, Butterworths), pp. 166ff.

See http://www.google.com/privacy.html.

See http://www.google.com/terms_of_service.html.

See, e.g., Google's Remove Page option at: http://www.google.com/remove.html, and Remove Image option at: http://www.google.com/remove.html#images.

• Effectively, they should put an entry like:

• User-agent: Googlebot

• Disallow: /*.gif$

• in their robots.txt file which is read whenever a robot visits a page; or something like < META NAME = “ROBOTS” CONTENT = “NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW” > in the metatag of each HTML document they want to exclude (see Google's Page Remove option (http://www.google.com/remove.html ) for details). This does not represent so much a technical problem as a nuissance to the user who wishes to be excluded from the Internet indices.

Directive 2000/31/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 8 June 2000 on certain legal aspects of information society services, in particular electronic commerce, in the Internal Market (Official Journal L 178, 17/07/2000, pp. 1 – 16).

For the list of countries in both categories, see Rohnke (2003) ‘Direct marketing: Opt-out/opt-in’. Available online at: www.whitecase.com/global_privacy_symposium_2003/rohnke.pdf.

Directive 2002/58/EC of the European Parliament and the Council of 12 July 2002 concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector (Official Journal L 201, 31/07/2002, pp. 37 – 47).

Isenberg (2002) The GigaLaw Guide to Internet Law (New York, Random House), pp. 169ff.

See: www.archive.org.

See www.archive.org/about/terms.php.