Copyright and 'Caching'

Consider the act of 'browsing' on the Internet. Typically, when looking for information in cyberspace, a user browses many sites, perusing their contents in order to find the information sought. Ironically, under the current copyright regime, this act is, itself, a copyright infringement.

This is a result of the implementation of the technology itself. When a user wants to view a particular web page, the browser sends a request out over the Internet to the appropriate web server for a file called an HTML file. The web server sends a copy of the file back to the browser. The browser interprets and displays on screen the text and graphics of the web document, according to the instructions contained in the HTML file. The HTML file itself contains the text for the document, but the graphics files, being much larger, are kept as separate files on the server, and are called up individually by the browser. The end result produced on the user's screen by the browser software, combining text, layout, and images, constitutes a web page.

In order to expedite this process, the technology implements certain short cuts known as 'caching'. The cache in a browser has important copyright implications. The browser caches (stores) copies of the text and images of visited web pages. These are stored on the local server as well as on the hard drive of the user's computer. The purpose of caching is to improve access to web pages.

The time it takes for an entire web page to reach the user depends on the information-carrying capacity (the "bandwidth") of the Internet connection between the web server and the user's computer. The vast amount of information being transmitted can create bottlenecks that will impede the progress of this information. Caching the graphics from previous transmissions, however, speeds up this process tremendously, thereby alleviating much of the congestion at bottlenecks.

Caching, however, has serious legal implications. This process means that viewing a web page necessarily involves making a copy of it in the memory of the client computer. At the very minimum, there must be a copy of the information in the computer's Random Access Memory (RAM), otherwise the client software would be unable to interpret and display the web page.