14 DAY TRIAL // Just as the infamous 'three-strikes' law gets delayed further in France, the UK is working on its own controversial version. Dubbed the Digital Economy Bill, the law outlines government policies mostly relating to the Internet and has gotten a lot of flack for some of its provisions regarding copyright. The bill is still under review and a proposed amendment to it is sure to spark a lot of debate. In it, Conservative Lord Lucas proposes that search engines would be exempt from copyright and would be able to access and copy any website they wish with an assumed permission.
"Every provider of a publicly accessible website shall bepresumed to give a standing and non-exclusive license to providers of search engine services to make a copy of some or all of the content of that website, for the purpose only of providing said search engine services," amendment 292 reads according to PaidContent. “A provider of search engine services who acts in accordance with this section shall not be liable for any breach of copyright.”
Basically, it enables Google, or any other search engine, to index any website and make copies of its content, even in its entirety, if those copies will be used solely for the purpose of providing search services. This would settle a lot of disputes and arguments that have been plaguing the online environment lately.
The most obvious one would be the whole Google News debacle, which applies to any other news aggregator, in which some old media voices have repeatedly accused Google of 'stealing' their content. With the proposed provision, Google would be well within its rights to provide content from any news source. This is especially important in the UK where the 'fair use' doctrine in Copyright Law doesn't exist like in the US.
The amendment, though, doesn't give search engines carte blanche to scrape any content they want. By default, search engines will have this right, but content owners could decide to block search engines from scraping their sites.