How do you take something back online? The question comes up in the unlikely form of a withdrawn blog post by Times religion correspondent and blogger Ruth Gledhill.
[The post was originally written in response to an obituary by Church Times columnist Andrew Brown — background at his blog.]
The withdrawn post was then reproduced at another religious affairs blog, the Voice of Iyov.
A commenter, claiming to be Gledhill, requested it be taken down:
I appreciate your coverage but would really rather prefer you did not reproduce an entire blog that I wisely had second thoughts about. I suspect there are even copyright issues involved here. A few pertinent quotes from it would surely be sufficient?
And you can see from the link above that the post has been altered by the author so that the only reference to Gledhill’s original is a direct link to the whole thing on Google’s cache, where — of course — it can be read in its entirety.
So is it “published”? It’s still out there — albeit harder to find. What if it had been defamatory? Would Google then incur liability as sole remaining publisher? Nothing is clear.
But for now the withdrawn post remains in online limbo. Or purgatory, if you prefer.
V good questions here! To my shame, I did not realise about google cache until this episode. Even at The Times, they are under the impression that if a blog is taken down that is it, it can never be retrieved. Food for thought, isn’t it? I too am wondering about the libel situation. On its cache site, Google has a disclaimer, saying it is not responsible for the content. So what happens if a blog actually is subject to a libel action. Do google take it down or leave it up? Further, surely there are copyright issues for them as well here? It seems unclear to me. Last night I dropped a line to google asking for clarification.
Do let me know what Google’s response is. I think the cache is a real minefield for things like libel.
Speaking with my legal hat on — I think in most western legal societies Google is not considered a publisher, but an ISP. When it engages in search and archiving, Google functions like a microfiche reader or card catalog / index in the library — it helps you locate things that OTHERS have published. So, if you held Google responsible for the wrongs of authors, you would also have to hold other archivists like the British Library responsible.
In my opinion, Google (and similar services) do not change anything in the new media world by creating online archives. If a newspaper is published in print form, it stays published forever … you cannot take back all the print copies out there circulating throughout society, including those that end up in organisational or personal libraries or archives.
That’s always the danger of ‘speaking’ — you can never take it back. How many millions of letters or emails do their authors regret sending? And those are thought to be one-to-one communications.
The only thing that has changed is that some authors now (wrongly) think that the internet resembles the hard-drive of their computer or their mobile phone — you can just erase it. Well, that’s not the case — if you want to speak, then speak — but it will be heard the first time…and somewhere stored forever.
Anyway, that’s my take. Authors, not Google, need to reorient themselves to the reality of internet archiving.
Given the balance of power between Google and authors, you’re probably right.
Thank you Russ for an interesting legal opinion. The thing I take issue with, that is the grey area here, is the difference between the spoken and written word. Yes, once spoken you cannot take something back, but you could not be sued for libel. There is of course slander and criminal libel regarding the spoken word, but they are very different in law from libel regarding the written word. I don’t think legally that google will in the long term be able to get away with arguing it is not a publisher if it is going to publish articles written by others, especially without their permisison, and after the original authors have withdrawn those articles. Look at the disputes that have been going on in the music industry about illicit use of original material on the internet. Why should writers not be equally protected? Or is the law on copyright just going to become redundant because it can no longer be enforced, in which case that also has massive implications for the fields of music and literature. I’ve had no reply from google but I heard last night that some extremely, extremely high-up lawyers in the uk are currently looking at this google cache issue, and that senior people at The Times are aware of it,
Hi Ruth — I followed it up here. And you can ask Google to un-cache material. See also <a href=“http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2006/01/google-cache-ruled-fair-use” target=_blank” rel=“nofollow”>this on copyright.
Thank you Adrian, would you mind letting me know how you ask them to do that? I couldn’t find an appropriate email on their website, which is why I wrote to the press office who haven’t responded yet. Ruth
Ruth — Google’s link on preventing and removing cached content is here, although it uses metatags to achieve the result.
Thank you again. From that, it is clear that it is possible to remove cached posts only if the blog is published. I can’t do it with an unpublished or deleted post. However, I do now know of another solution, having read that.…!