I read your article and I’m going to comment on it in just a minute (answering your question there). But thank you for your comment here.

However, I will say that I use FURL very heavily in my work. As you might imagine, I deal heavily with sites that are likely or certainly going to go down in a day or so, so Furl is an easy way for me to preserve evidence and a record. I also use it to preserve articles for the Copyright 2.0 Show before I move them over to Delicious.

That being said though, I keep my account private and primarily use the external link. The cached copy is only a backup.

I was wary of the same issues but I realized that A) They don’t cache sites that have the nocache meta tag or forbid it in their robots.txt. B) Cached copies are not available to search engines that I’ve been able to find. C) The cached content is used non-commercially in most cases. D) Though they do less good than the Web Archive or Google Cache, they also do much less harm. I would wager that the “Greater Good” argument you mention still applies.

Though this stuff has to be taken case by case by case, I feel comfortable that Furl would pass a fair use test, especially given the others sites that have. But any service that wants to enter this field needs to tread carefully. There’s a dangerous line here that is mostly invisible.

In some cases, the rip off is naive. They just want to “bookmark” the content on the blog to help them remember. There is a fear that they won’t be able to find it in the future, so ripping it off “preserves” it.

Either way, you are so right. It is incredibly painful to the blogger whose core content is taken.

Which reminds me, have you dealt with the copyright issues of Furl and other “bookmarking” sites which allow preservation of the entire post content on their servers for individual? Google and the Way Back Archive both get away with copyright violations because of the perception of “greater good”, but what about the others?

Thanks, as always, for helping us fight the good fight!