Under one roof at Google Labs, Mountain View, CA - resides the smartest bunch of geeks and nerds in the world. The whole internet has been waiting for them to trip up for a long time. I've been hearing doomsday forecasts about google forever. What particularly interested me was Google's cache and possible lawsuits over copyright infrinement or linking to illegal content. Let's take a deeper look at this, including a trip back in time to Stanford.

Google's Cache

Undeniably the biggest collection of webpages, the google cache is a treasure trove of information which can be used for a never-ending series of applications. It also creates a big copyrights problem, because a lot of pages are explicitly not to reproduced - which the google cache does. I'm sure the Google Guys are quite aware of this, but still it goes on - caching every single page that is available on the net.

COPS

I recently visited Sergei Brin's projects page at Stanford, where I bumped into this : Copy Detection Mechanisms for Digital Documents.
They make a search engine to spider the web called 'Google' as a project, and we all know how it turned out. Sergei also did COPS as a project and the summary of it is - 'How to use search engine spiders to detect copyright infringements of digital documents.' It wouldn't be that difficult to assume that with the world's biggest and most efficient search engine spiders and webpage repository at their disposal, that they just might provide a 'COPS' for google users and webmasters. The irony is that the very tool which is infringing copyrights by making copies of webpages will be used to provide the most foolproof detection tool in the hostory of the internet.