[comboy]

But we are in the f up territory. Does EU law says anything about meta tags? If not, then unless explicitly allowed you can't copy it.

On so many levels.

[pbhjpbhj]

Copyright infringement is a tort though, so it's down to content owners to sue Google if they feel damaged by this "caching".

I think countries added workarounds for computer caching, allowing transient copies. But Google's "cache" or more of a short term archive, I'd guess they called it "cache" to semantically bypass the issue of it being an infringing copy.

[d2wa]

Yes, actually it does. So does AU, US, and CA laws. Or, not expressly, but it does say a caching service must respect recognized industry standards for updating, removing, and excluding content from being cached. That covers HTML meta elements, HTTP caching headers, /robots.txt files, etc.