Aren’t AMP Caches committing copyright infringement?
<https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/amp-cache-copyright> Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) are specially formatted web pages that companies like Cloudflare, Google, and Microsoft copy off publishers’ websites and make available through their own AMP Cache web servers. There is no redistribution license agreement between the AMP Caches and the publishers, so how come AMP Caches aren’t considered copyright infringement on a massive scale? Like the name suggest, albeit heavily disputed, the purpose of AMP is to speed up webpage delivery time and performance on high-latency mobile devices. Web publishers can either choose to specifically create AMP-formatted web pages in addition or instead of their regular web pages. Some publishing platform may create AMP variants alongside the regular web page without the knowledge of the author (the copyright holder). [...] # Requirements for caching safe harbor provisions Caches and caches are vaguely defined in copyright laws. However; Australian, Canadian, European Union, and USA laws agree that the caching process must be automatic and that the caches must follow industry standards for removing and updating cached materials. AMP Caches satisfies this requirement by supporting the industry standard HTTP Cache-Control header and other related caching headers. EU law also requires that the caching must only be done for the purpose of making communications more efficient; which is how Google have presented AMP all along. Copyright laws require that no modifications are made to the cached creative works. Australian and Canadian copyright laws specifically grants exceptions to this requirement for changes made by an undefined technical processes. EU and USA copyright laws have no such exceptions. AMP Caches makes a few notable optimizations and modifications to cached content. These changes performed by the AMP Caches are done to achieve high performance but it may also be stripping away their safe harbor provisions as allowed for under EU and USA copyright laws. [...] # The implied license An implied license in the context of copyright law is a license granted by a rights holder in the absence of an expressly written contract. You really need to be a copyright lawyer to make any sense of the finer details of implied licenses. Most resources on implied licenses that I found on the web consists of little more than lawyers shaking their heads at the lack of an expressly written legal agreement in their place.
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Giacomo Tesio