Judge says Google's cache is OK, but about that lawyer who sued...

Just about the time you think judges will never understand how technology relates to intellectual property, you get a pleasant surprise.  A U.S. District Court judge in Nevada has ruled that Google's practice of caching Web pages for several weeks is fair use under U.S. copyright laws.

Actually, Judge Robert C. Jones did more than that. In his ruling, he pretty well shreds the arguments made by the guy who sued Google, a Las Vegas lawyer named Blake Field who apparently hoped to hit a $2.5 million jackpot in statutory damages.

Field created a website, published some essays on it and took steps to make sure Google would index and cache it, then filed his lawsuit. That's the nice, respectable news-reporter's way of describing what Field did.

But here's how the judge described it: "Field decided to manufacture a claim for copyright infringement against Google in the hopes of making money from Google's standard practice....Field’s own conduct stands in marked contrast to Google’s good faith. Field took a variety of affirmative steps to get his works included in Google’s search results, where he knew they would be displayed with 'Cached' links to Google’s archival copy and he deliberately ignored the protocols that would have instructed Google not to present 'Cached' links."

This ruling is getting some attention because it may (or may not) have some weight in another lawsuit -- the one by book publishers who object to Google Book Search (formerly known as "Google Print"). Judge Jones's ruling doesn't directly control how a judge in that case will rule. But Jones gets pretty detailed in his analysis of how Google's technology works and how it relates to fair use, opt-out versus opt-in, and other legal issue in the search business.

There's another reason to be glad that Judge Jones clearly understands how all this works, though. Reasonable people can reasonably disagree when it comes to copyrights and technology. There are still areas of law unsettled on this frontier, and sometimes those disagreements will end up in court. We're all at risk of getting sued, even when everyone has the best of intentions.

But when some, er, enterprising lawyer decides to manufacture a claim in hopes of collecting millions of dollars, gambling that a judge won't see through his baseless argument, it's nice to see the judge slap him down so thoroughly.

Incidentally, as Groklaw's Pamela Jones notes, Judge Robert C. Jones is also the judge assigned to SCO Group's lawsuit against AutoZone for daring to use Linux. Any similarity to Field v. Google is left as an exercise for the student.