Under U.S. law, a sufficiently original work (i.e. a work created by its author and not copied by someone else) may qualify for copyright protection if it is fixed in a tangible medium of expression. When a file is stored on a web server`s hard drive, it is “fixed” enough to be protected by copyright. The owner of this fixed work has several exclusive rights under U.S. law, including the right to reproduce the work in copies. Therefore, no one can legally copy the work without the permission of the owner. Since caching creates a copy of the work, the caching site can be considered to have infringed the exclusive reproduction right of the owner of that work. * Google Cache is eligible for DMCA 512(b) “Safe Harbor” caching for online service providers.
Mobile apps are an incredibly fast-growing market segment given the rapid adoption of consumer devices and the decline in the use of traditional computing equipment. Whether for gaming, commercial apps, health apps, etc., virtually every market segment today has a mobile-friendly app. From an app development perspective, building mobile apps is very similar to creating any other form of app. You have the same problem areas, your presentation plan, your business level, and your data plane. While your screen real estate and developer tools are different, providing a great user experience is a common goal for all apps. With effective caching strategies, your mobile apps can deliver the performance your users expect, scale massively, and reduce your overall costs. An important issue raised by caching is “freshness.” The cache may not reflect updates to the original hardware. However, websites can set an expiration date that allows caches to “expire” pages and return at appropriate intervals for a new original. Another issue is advertising: while users may get faster access to a cached site, the source site may not record those visits as visits, and advertisers need to know how many times the source has been contacted. (Two weeks ago, a coalition of online advertisers called FAST (Future of Advertising Stakeholders) suggested that the e-commerce industry uniformly adopt software that tracks individual viewers across cached sites.) A third issue raised by caching is copyright infringement. The problems with this change are: (1) rights holders may not have explicitly “authorized” caching, it would be tedious to ask them to do so, and there was no clear indication that implied authorization would suffice, and (2) it is very difficult to say whether the use of a copyrighted work has “no economic significance” for rights holders. The Internet Society warned that the change would slow down the internet`s performance and “clog its arteries,” and ISPs argued that it would make most network activity illegal.
The recording industry, which supported the amendment, said that “the proposed directive is only there to emphasise that pirated copies cannot be downloaded because they do not respect copyright”. A U.S. District Court in Nevada has ruled in favor of Google, declaring Google Cache legal and fair. Google Cache is Google`s method of storing web content in its search engine store, with saved versions of websites appearing in Google web search results. Caching is not just a law and order issue on the internet and an ISP issue. Multinational corporations often use global intranets as enterprise-wide communication vehicles. A company with a corporate intranet with local access points in Europe will be tempted to use caching to avoid redundant traffic caused by many employees accessing popular information in the home office. Let`s say you work for a company with an office in France that relies heavily on the company`s intranet. Given the opacity of case law, it is at least conceivable that a French authority could invoke the Copyright Directive to challenge your company`s right to intermediate storage of material. If your end users can cache, you may need to describe it in your own Terms of Service/EULA to comply with the API terms. And the API may not allow you to provide API data to your own users. Read it and see.
Is this restriction enforceable? What if the end user is the one caching the data on their end? I would have no control over that. If it makes a difference, the information provided by the API is not proprietary, the only service they offer is an easy-to-use API and a few extra features to query the underlying information.