Gyaan Sutra On entrepreneurship and technology

An interesting debate seems to be going on the courts. One woman put up some text on her website and claimed that the people entering the website were agreeing to the contract that people who visited here website would pay huge amounts of money to her if they copied content off the website.

What happened next was expected, the crawler of the Internet Archive saved up one of her pages, and now the woman has shown them the bill. The courts seem to be divided at the moment about who is right in this scenario.

This is similar to another court case which had been going on for a while where a newspaper sued Google for caching their page, saying that using their content was not what they thought was fair use.

The internet has changed our lives in so many ways, that a lot of the old wisdom is not true anymore. Interestingly, I see most of these attempts as ways to discretely increase the brand’s visibility, and to make money by honing in on the loopholes in the law. But to be true, the Google fair use policy would not exactly hold ground if the issue was about something offline, say a book or copyrighted information from a company.

The only way to tackle these variations in courts is to start working on new and improved laws, maybe one which can hold machines responsible for what they do.

Maybe the crawler of the Internet Archive should be asked to pay the damages, and if it cannot, it can be fired and sent to jail.