I've been making jnoise for years about Google's blig attitude toward copyright infringement. All search engines, it can be argued, infringe simply by crawling and indexing the Web. The indexes are not copies of Web pages so much as encoded condensations, but a case could still be made. Google treads onto thin ice by caching its crawled pages—and those cached copies really are copies. In this case there is no denying the infringement, but no serious challenge has ever been mounted. Now, with a major publishing association issuing serious warnings to Google over its Google Print for Libraries adventure, Danny Sullivan speculates that a bad court decision for Google could open the company to deeper trouble over its cache. The key issue to Danny Sullivan is Google's opt-out solution, which applies to both Web site owners and book publishers. Problem is, copyright in America doesn't operate by putting the burden of permission on the content owner; the burden lies with the content appropriator. In other words: Google should be asking for permission to cache each and every Web site it crawls. Danny Sullivan's doomsday scenario might never come to pass, though, as Google is more likely to strike a deal with publishers and their associations rather than let disputes reach a courtroom.