Field v. Google Inc., 412 F. Supp. 2d 1106 - Dist. Court, D. Nevada 2006

—holding that the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) provides a “safe harbor” exemption from liability for making cached copies of copyrighted works

However, the Court finds that this is not a hard and fast rule: "[E] ven copying of entire works should not weigh against a fair use finding where the new use serves a different function from the original, and the original work can be viewed by anyone free of charge."

That said, some courts have found that the use of an entire work was a fair use under “certain circumstances

—the district court noted that a license can be implied when a copyright holder engages in conduct giving rise to an inference that the owner consents to the use.

Internet search engine not directly liable for automatic copying made during the engine's "caching" process

In Field, a website owner sued Google for posting archived copies of the site's pages, which included copyrighted content.

—considering both defendant's good faith in promptly removing the infringing content and plaintiff's bad faith in ginning up the litigation

The court rationalized that: Because Google serves different and socially important purposes in offering access to copyrighted works through “Cached” links and does not merely supersede the objectives of the original creations, the Court concludes that Google' s alleged copying and distribution of Field' s Web pages containing copyrighted works was transformative

"An implied license can be found where the copyright holder engages in conduct `from which [the] other [party] may properly infer that the owner consents to his use. "

“Google makes and analyzes a copy of each Web page that it finds, and stores the HTML code from those pages in a temporary repository called a cache.”