Amendment proposed to Digital Economy Bill which would clarify that search engines are exempt for copying web pages

Search engines crawl the world wide web and copy pages for the purpose of providing their search services to web users. That use may be an infringement of copyright on a massive scale of the owners of all of the relevant web pages. However, that may just be a technical infringement, because most web site owners are happy for Google and others to scour their site and copy the pages for the purpose of giving the site a ranking in response to users’ search requests. It has been thought that web site owners give the search engines an implied licence to copy and use the material for the purpose of providing search engine services. That has never been properly tested in court, though.  

A Conservative peer, Lord Lucas, now wishes to put that argument beyond doubt. He has proposed amendments to the Government’s Digital Economy Bill which would give search engines a presumption that they have the right to copy material for the purpose of providing their search engine services. Web site owners could still refuse permission if they want. In practice, the permission would be refused by technical measures taken by the web site.

Paul Gershlick, a Partner at Matthew Arnold & Baldwin LLP and editor of www.Upload-IT.com, comments: ‘This proposal seems sensible. It’s one of those cases of the law having failed to catch up with the technology. The change may not be needed in practice, but if it helps to give search engine service providers comfort that their essential web services are not illegal, then that would not be a bad thing.’