Law note · United States (federal only)
Field v. Google, Inc.
cite 412 F. Supp. 2d 1106 (D. Nev. 2006)
stage IN FORCE
The court granted Google summary judgment, holding that caching of copyrighted web pages was both fair use and covered by an implied license. Because the plaintiff was aware of the industry-standard robots.txt and noarchive meta-tag protocols for excluding crawlers and chose not to deploy them, he impliedly consented to Google's caching, establishing that robots.txt opt-out is a legally meaningful mechanism for controlling search-engine indexing and snippet display.
Primary source: CourtListener
citation confirmed from search results as 412 F. Supp. 2d 1106