Copyright Indemnity for Search Engines in the UK
February 3, 2010
Copyright ©
Amendments to a Bill in the UK seek to provide copyright indemnity for search engines.
The proposed amendment 292 of the Digital Economy Bill if accepted will allow for the copying of information in part or in whole from websites by the search engines as part of the purpose of providing search engine services. This means that search engines such as Google and Yahoo will be able to index parts of news publisher sites and that deep linking would not be a problem or risk of copyright infringement.
If approved by the House of Lords the amendments could also mean that publishers or website owners would not have the right to block search spiders through robots.txt files.
The outcome remains to be seen, but with such rights given to search engines, website owners will enjoy less copyright protection.
