From InternetNews.com:
Google is free to cache whatever material it wants unless content owners specifically forbid the search site from copying and archiving online content, a federal judge ruled last Friday.
The judge dismissed a lawsuit claiming Google had violated an author’s copyright by archiving his Usenet posts and providing excerpts from his Web site in Google’s search results.
Gordon Roy Parker, who is also known as Ray Gordon, filed suit against Google in 2004, after the search engine archived a chapter of one of Parker’s e-books, “29 Reasons Not To Be A Nice Guy.” Gordon had posted the chapter on Usenet, a collective name for the thousands of public discussion forms available online.