Copyright fair use and DMCA Safe harbor work well for a search engine.

Copyright fair use and DMCA Safe harbor provide internet users with great benefits because they can obtain information by looking up on a search engine such as Google. The progress of information technology has greatly relied on these legal concepts. A search engines is gathering information from the Internet day by day, which means the search engine copies contents, such as text and images, owned by others to search engine’s storage. This activity could infringe copyrights. In fact, in Japan, there are no successful commercial search engines. (For example, Japanese search engines Goo and Infoseek use the search result of Google.) It is said that one of the reasons for this is that Japanese IT companies are concerning about copyright. Japanese copyright law does not have either fair use defense or safe harbor defense. There is a related case in US. In Field v. Google., 412 F.Supp 2d 1106 (D. Nev. 2006) , the court ruled in favor of Google arguing fair use defense and DMCA safe harbor. Can you imagine the world without Google?