Cache at the End of His Rainbow General IP Issues1/16/2001; 11:52:24 AM 'Just ask Jake Savin, a San Francisco programmer who recently lost an entire website -- and three years' hard work -- but found a copy of his entire site in Google's online archive. 'It's worth pointing out that it has been questioned whether what Google is doing is legal, or if it is illegal redistribution of content. I want to point out that this could be an instance where we are being blinded to negative consequences because a high-profile good consequence is blocking consideration of the negative ones.Suppose Jake had deliberately deleted the website. Now it's still in Google's cache. Yes, legally, if he demanded that they remove it, they'd have to, but it's obvious that we can't know e who all is caching our content.I'm not suggesting that these sort of caches are bad, my real opinions are more complicated then that, I just want to point this out as an example of when a small, relatively uncommon good effect can totally obscure much larger questions about other effects. We get this in other places all the time... "it's for the children!" "we tax media because occaisionally somebody might pirate something, so we'll pay off the music companies just in case." The full stories deserves more consideration.Update: A discussion of this on geeknews, later found on dangerousmeta. (Actually, it's not very good; nobody's even mentioned the DMCA, without which you can't understand the legality of the cache.)