International Law

Search Engine Copyright Exception Culture Ministry Ordinance

By Karl-Friedrich Lenz

The government ordinance on the search engine exception leaves the standard for opting out to be defined by an ordinance of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. That ordinance was also enacted on December 28, 2009, and it introduced a new Article 4-4 into the Copyright Law Execution Order (????????). In my translation, that Article reads:

“Chapter Seven  Standards for Prohibition of Collecting Information made Available for Download.

Article 4-4 The standard of Article 7-5 of the copyright law execution ordinance means that the person defined in Article 47-6 of the copyright law (including the case of application under Article 102, Paragraph 1 of the copyright law. The same applies for the rest of this Article) takes one of the following measures to prohibit the collecting of information following established customs.

1. Write the following statements into a electronic file called “robots.txt” which is made available for download (electronic file as in Article 31 of the copyright law. The same applies for number 2 below).

a) A prohibition of the collection of information by the person defined in Article 47-6 of the copyright law directed at programs.

b) Specification of the scope of the prohibition of the collection of information by the person defined in Article 47-6 of the copyright law.

2. Writing a prohibition of the collection of information made available for download by the person defined in Article 47-6 of the copyright law into an electronic HTML or similar file which is made available for download.”

Number 2 above also includes a definition of “HTML”. I refrain from translating it here, since it is absolutely useless. Anybody applying this Article already knows what hypertext markup language is.

In contrast, Number 2 above does not require that the prohibition is included in the appropriate metatag. See for example the explanation “The Robot META Tag Values” at SearchTools.com. However, since the whole standard requires adhering to “established customs” it would be not sufficient to just write some prohibition in the body of the text where the robots would not find it.

Number 2 does not require to specify the scope of the prohibition. That is probably because it is contained in the head of a single page anyway, so it is clear without specification that the page in question is included in the scope,while some other page without the metatag is not. However, under established customs it is possible to do partial prohibitions. For example, someone might direct Google to provide no snippets or not to follow links (as a countermeasure to link spam). These possibilities are not reflected in number 2. But again, under “established customs” it would make no sense to allow them in robots.txt but not in html metatags.

I have no idea what the Ministry means to say by “file similar to html”.

Full post as published by Lenz Blog on February 23, 2010 (boomark / email).