[lionrock88]

Legal question - hope you IP lawyers can help me with this one.

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/004344.php
http://www.eff.org/IP/blake_v_google...vada_order.pdf

Above are 2 links regarding the US ruling on Google's caching feature. Essentially, Google argues that it has an "implied license" to cache web publishers' content, if publishers don't include a "no archive" meta tag to stop Google's crawlers from crawling the site.

There are a few job aggregating engines out there such as indeed.com, simplyhired.com, vast.com, edgeio.com (for the USA) and recruit.net (in Asia) that crawl all the job boards and corporate career pages on the web. Most of them provide a brief summary of a job posting and then provide an outward link to the relevant 'host' job site under the "fair use" provision - similar to the way Google News works. Others, such as edgeio, will cache the entire job posting and display it on the site.

My question is -what is legally possible in Hong Kong? What are the copyright laws when it comes to crawling and caching content on Hong Kong websites? Do we have an implied license to cache an entire job posting or other content on our site? Or is the "fair use" provision valid here? Is there something else I should be aware of?

Any lawyers care to elaborate?

(note: this question was originally posted on http://www.hkstartup.com/community/viewtopic.php?t=13)

[KnowItAll]

Find a good IP lawyer and be prepared to pay to get this answered and then get a second opinion if your business and your kids's college fund depends on it.

I would recommend

Stephenson / Harwood and Lo : http://www.shl.com.hk/intro_frame.html -- I met their partner who handles IP / trademarks and she has good qualifications.

Rebecca Lo and Company: The partner there is Clement Lam. Drop me a note if you want his contacts.

Seriously....

[lionrock88]

I was hoping for some good pro bono advice from our friendly lawyers on this forum.

Thanks for the recommendatiom, KIA. I'll drop you a note.

[KnowItAll]

Lionrock : trademarks / IP / legal ... don't bother with free stuff.

After all, you'd not go to a forum to talk about the tumor in your brain... would you?

[lionrock88]

As I mentioned in my note to you, this is just a side feature we were thinking about rolling out so it's not critical to our business. At this stage, we don't really want to start hiring high-priced lawyers for a feature that we may or may not have.

It'd be great to get some general opinions from any of the more legal-minded members of the board. And no, I won't be making my decision based solely on what our members say so no worries there!

[KnowItAll]

UK law will probably be more releavant in this case.

Caching
18. Where an information society service is provided which consists of the transmission in a communication network of information provided by a recipient of the service, the service provider (if he otherwise would) shall not be liable for damages or for any other pecuniary remedy or for any criminal sanction as a result of that transmission where -

(a) the information is the subject of automatic, intermediate and temporary storage where that storage is for the sole purpose of making more efficient onward transmission of the information to other recipients of the service upon their request, and

(b) the service provider -

(i) does not modify the information;

(ii) complies with conditions on access to the information;

(iii) complies with any rules regarding the updating of the information, specified in a manner widely recognised and used by industry;

(iv) does not interfere with the lawful use of technology, widely recognised and used by industry, to obtain data on the use of the information; and

(v) acts expeditiously to remove or to disable access to the information he has stored upon obtaining actual knowledge of the fact that the information at the initial source of the transmission has been removed from the network, or access to it has been disabled, or that a court or an administrative authority has ordered such removal or disablement.

http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2002/20022013.htm

[lionrock88]

This is great info!