By William New
(republished with permission from Geneva-based Intellectual Property Watch)
In an unprecedented action suggesting intellectual property rights have bumped up against an access threshold, thousands of websites have gone “dark” today in protest against two draft anti-piracy and counterfeiting bills in the US Congress that the protestors say would harm freedoms online. The protest includes major technology firms like Google, Mozilla, Wikipedia, Flikr, Reddit, Vimeo and WordPress.
The website SOPA Strike lists dozens of participating sites.
US technology lobbying groups have joined as well, such as the Consumer Electronics Association, Center for Democracy and Technology, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Computer and Communications Industry Association, MoveOn.org, and the National Venture Capital Association. A range of others, such as environmental activist group Greenpeace, tech publication Wired, BoingBoing.net, the Internet Archive, internet anonymity site Tor Project, and software service Tucows joined in. A number of websites provided tools for reaching congressional representatives or to sign a petition. Facebook created a page raising concerns about the bills.
At issue are two bills in Congress: the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and its Senate variant, the Protect IP Act (PIPA). Sponsors of the bills proposed changes in recent days (IPW, US Policy, 17 January 2012), but the protest proceeded to send its message.
Google put a black censorship block over its well-known image above the search mechanism box. It included a link to a page declaring “End Piracy Not Liberty”, and explaining: “Millions of Americans oppose SOPA and PIPA because these bills would censor the Internet and slow economic growth in the U.S. Two bills before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House, would censor the Web and impose harmful regulations on American business. Millions of Internet users and entrepreneurs already oppose SOPA and PIPA.
The Senate will begin voting on January 24th. Please let them know how you feel. Sign this petition urging Congress to vote NO on PIPA and SOPA before it is too late,” Google said.
Google added:
This editorial has been moved to the Editor’s Notepad blog, where it was originally intended to sit (apologies for the early morning confusion).
GENEVA, SWITZERLAND – Google’s license to operate in mainland China has been renewed for a year. The company has lost market share since it started re-directing traffic to its Hong Kong operations after it was unable to resolve its spat with the Chinese government over censorship. The Chinese license nevertheless allows it to pick up advertising from Chinese companies keen to reach the world outside China.
PC Magazine reports that Google now has just over 18 percent of the search market in China, compared to Baidu’s more than 75 percent.
Links to other sites: Bloomberg, PC Magazine
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Google’s latest legal faceoff, in the state of Texas, has resulted in a relatively small fine of $5 million for the search engine giant, but the ramifications of the case could be huge, reports Geneva-based IP Watch.
The company was sued in 2009 by Bedrock Computer Technologies, “a firm that has been seen as a patent troll, one that does not produce products but rather acquires patents in order to sue other companies for profit,” according to IP Watch. Google was found guilty of patent infringement “in some of its use of open-source Linux code”, a finding that could affect the millions of others who use Linux and other open-source systems.
Tech2 says the tables have now been turned and Red Hat, which supplies the code used by Google, is suing Bedrock, saying the patent is invalid.
Oracle is also suing Google for patent infringement, notes eweekeurope, while Bedrock is busy suing several companies besides Google, including Yahoo, MySpace and Amazon.
Google is having a bad-air week with France fining it $100,000 for Google Street Views and China purportedly disrupting the company’s G-mail service in some areas.
France’s CNIL, the data privacy watchdog, 21 March handed Google a €100,000 fine for capturing private data from wifi systems while its Google Street Views photographed European sites from 2007 to 2010. The fine is the largest CNIL has ever handed out. Google apologized in May 2010 for the inadvertent data collection, saying it was due to an engineer’s mistake and involved 600 GB of data from 30 countries. The company faces other Street View privacy infringement suits, including charges in Switzerland by the privacy watchdong.
The company announced Monday that problems it was experiencing with its G-mail system are not a fault in the system but the result of hacking in China. The company in January 2010 decided to stop filtering search information at the request of the Chinese government and it has since posted messages saying “According to local laws, regulations and policies, some research results are not shown.” It moved some of its search operations to Hong Kong in July 2010.
The USA-based company has on several occasions accused the Chinese government of hacking its services, information backed up by Internet researchers, mainly in North America, while Chinese media point to Google’s one-third share of the $1 billion market, (2009) compared to Baidu’s two-thirds, as an underlying issue. Google in January threatened to leave China altogether. The company has 700 employees in China.
Links to other sites: BBC, Forbes blog, Huffington Post, Reuters, Xinhua
Peter Barron, director, Google, speaking on Internet freedom in Geneva 4 March 2011 (photo, US Mission)
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) - Peter Barron, a Google director, says that Internet activity in Libya in the past 24 hours has been “exactly zero”, citing the difficulty protestors there face trying to use the same kind of tools that protestors have recently used elsewhere in the Middle East to topple dictators.
Libya’s Internet access has been intermittent for the past two weeks, reports Fast Company, with spikes where “ingenious activists” have managed to break through the country’s firewall (graph from Arbor Networks provided).
Barron was speaking as part of an Internet freedom panel in Geneva organized by the US Mission. He noted that in 2002 four governments intervened in Internet access, but “we’ve seen a growing trend and there are around 40 today, a very worrying sign.”
“It is suicidal for governments to think that they can opt out of the Internet,” points out Michael Posner of the US State Department, noting that in today’s world, commercial success alone is dependent on Internet access.
Google in late January rolled out early a project it had been working on with Twitter, called SayNow, that allows people to Tweet via phone, thereby getting around the problem of governments cutting Internet connections, as long as phone lines continue working.
Libya’s SayNow lines are still operating, notes Barron.
2,149 Spanish-speaking people from around the world will read “Don Quijote de la Mancha”, the 17th century masterpiece by Miguel de Cervantes, in its entirety on Youtube. The Royal Spanish Academy (RAE in its Spanish initials) will kick off a project today 30 September in an agreement with Google, owners of Youtube. The novel is often begun and then put down. The 2004 edition runs to over 1,200 pages including the index.
The RAE is promoting the project in an effort to make this and other Spanish literary masterpieces appeal to a younger generation.
The 400-year anniversary edition has been divided into 2,149 sections, each of which will be read and filmed by a different reader using the Quijote platform on Youtube. The project will be kicked off in Madrid today by Víctor García de la Concha, president of the RAE, who will read the first section, which begins: “In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind…”
The Royal Spanish Academy is the custodian of the Spanish language. It publishes a definitive dictionary and promotes Spanish language and culture.
Links to other sites: Herald Sun, Punto Digital
Debate grows over how much web site owners should tell visitors about information gleaned
What is my mouse telling web site owners?
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch.com) – The news that Google and the CIA are teaming up to predict the future based on what we’re already doing online has prompted yet another media debate over privacy and how much information is spilled by our online behaviour.
Spooks might worry the public but our use of the Internet is already providing a wealth of details many of us never consider.
A pair of students at Emory University in the US have just shown, at the SIGIR conference on information retrieval, at Unimail in Geneva in late July, how our mouse movements can tell companies whether we intend to buy or not, when we’re shopping online (Agichtein and Guo paper, pdf).
Such clues could provide valuable information for advertisers, say the authors. “The results show that our method is more effective than the current state-of-the-art techniques, both for detection of searcher goals, and for an important practical application of predicting ad clicks for a given search session.”
Advertising Age has jumped into the debate about how much web site owners should tell their customers, about the information they are able to gather, with an article arguing that sites should be more open about the information they receive about visitors.
Google is phasing out internal use of Microsoft Windows, reports the Financial Times, based on information from the search engine company’s staff. Google reportedly began to make the change, for security reasons, in January, after it experienced problems with hacking from China. The staff of 10,000 is being moved towards other operating systems, notably Mac OS.
Greenland and Iceland made no data requests to Google - minds were on other matters in 2009
San Francisco, California, USA (GenevaLunch) – Brazil is the leader, with the US close behind, for requests to Google by governments for data on users or censorship, figures released by the company Tuesday 20 April show. Brazil made 3,663 user data requests while the US made 3,580 between 1 July and 31 December 2009. Figures for China cannot be included, since they are considered state secrets, Google notes. It pulled out of China in March 2010 because of censorship and hacking problems.
Switzerland made 42 user data requests and fewer than 10 content removal requests.
Google has ended its standoff with the Chinese government by closing its mainland China search portal, moving searches to its uncensored Hong Kong portal, in an effort to end the dispute over censorship of online searches. China was quick to react angrily and industry observers say Google’s business in China is at risk. The company has been complying with Chinese censorship regulations, but announced earlier in 2010 that it would not continue to do so, and tensions between the US-based company and China have increased sharply. The company still has research and development plus sales staff in China.
Links to other sites: Financial Times, Reuters, UK, Xinhua
Reprinted in GenevaLunch with permission from IP Watch. IP Watch is a Geneva-based newsletter covering intellectual property issues.
By William New, editor, IP Watch
The United States Department of Justice yesterday told the US District Court for the Southern District of New York that progress had been made on its concerns in the settlement allowing internet search giant Google to scan millions of books into a searchable database. But the government lawyers continue to have doubts on copyright, class certification and antitrust issues, they said.
Justice made its views known in a 31-page filing [pdf] filed with the court on 4 February. While it praised efforts so far, the department said, “the amended settlement agreement suffers from the same core problem as the original agreement: it is an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the court in this litigation.”
In The Authors Guild Inc. et al. v. Google Inc. case, the district court is scheduled to hold a hearing on the proposed amended settlement agreement on 18 February.
Search-engine giant Google has said it is considering withdrawing from the lucrative Chinese market, citing concerns over its controversial acceptance of strict Chinese censorship rules in the past and a sophisticated hacking attempt on its computers that the company says originated in China itself.
The cyber attacks took place last week on several Google companies and aimed at the gmail accounts of Chinese dissidents. The US Secretary of State Hilary Clinton said “We have been briefed by Google on these allegations, which raise very serious concerns and questions. We look to the Chinese government for an explanation”. US President Barack Obama said last November on a visit to Shanghai that the USA was committed to freedom of information on the Internet.
Google opened shop in China in 2006, hoping to cash in on an online population that exceeds the entire population of the USA, some 330 million users. It agreed to restrict its search results to material acceptable to the Chinese government.
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Google and the Swiss data protection boss, Hanspeter Thuer, Thursday 17 December reached a temporary agreement on Google Street View while a Swiss government lawsuit is pending against the company. Google will refrain from activating Google Street View, under the terms of the agreement, as well as any other Street Views in Switzerland taken for other Google products. Google has also agreed to accept as binding a court decision on the matter “and is ready to implement it with regard to images recorded for Street View in Switzerland, if and to the extent that the award requests so”, according to the official Swiss government announcement on the agreement.
Google nevertheless retains the right to use its cameras, at its own risk, while the court case is underway, but it cannot use the image on the Internet. The company has also agreed to move from monthly to weekly alerts to communities and neighbourhoods about its plans to film in their areas.
Google is about to make our searches real-time, meaning that search results will include material as it is posted: articles, posts, information, twits on Twitter social netowrk exchanges and more. The world’s largest search engine company says it has already put the new system to work but it will take a couple days for “realtime web” to show up in search results worldwide.
Links to other sites: BBC, Business Week
Lavaux, canton Vaud, Switzerland
Zurich, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Google and Unesco have agreed to put 19 of the 890 World Heritage sites on Google Street View. Unesco is the United Nations agency behind the collection of sites. The two will be adding other World Heritage sites, mainly those that are less easily accessible, they said in a news release 3 December.
The other sites, such as the Lavaux terraced vineyards in canton Vaud, will be shown on Google Earth View and Google maps.
Links to other sites: Google/Unesco announcement, Unesco World Heritage sites, Lavaux, Switzerland
Google Street View in English: no luck, but try the French version
Bern, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Google Street View is being taken to the Swiss administrative high court in Bellinzona, Ticino, by Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner Hanspeter Thuer, after weeks of discussions have failed to force the company to comply with Thuer’s directives. The federal government, in a press release Friday 13 November notes that Thuer “requested Google to take various measures to protect personal privacy in its Street View online service. Google has however refused to implement the majority of the measures recommended.”
Google’s Swiss street views went online in mid-August, but 11 September the government ordered the company to better camouflage faces and vehicle license plates, particularly near “sensitive” areas such as schools, hospitals and prisons. Bern says that in its written reply 14 October Google refused to comply with most of the requests, or take into consideration these problems:
Google has sealed a deal to pay $750 million for AdMob, a mobile phone advertising company, in an all-stock deal that puts the search giant’s money on the future of mobile ads. The privately held AdMob’s revenues are estimated at $45-60 million, according to an analyst cited by Reuters.
Software giant Microsoft rolled out its first new operating system in years yesterday 22 October. Windows 7 is simpler, faster and has new features like limited touch-screen capabilities. Prices range from just under $200 for the basic Home Premium version to more than $300 for the Ultimate version.
Micorsoft’s previous operating system, Vista, was criticized for being difficult to use and having serious security problems. Microsoft, whose software runs on 90 percent of all PCs, is hoping to revive its reputation and needs to face challengers like Apple and Google. Increasingly, software and data is kept on distant servers, and consumers are flocking to simpler, cheaper netbooks. CNet, CNN
Iceland is touting itself as the ideal place to locate data centres. It is cool year-round, has abundant power in the form of geothermal energy and likes to think that it can become the first emission-free country in the world. The first data centre outside Reykjavik will be ready in a year to lease space to internet companies that want to relocate their power-hungry servers there.
The millions of servers in the world – Google alone is estimated to have a million – produce as much CO2 as the airline industry, and between 30-40 percent of the energy is used to keep them cool. Iceland has been laying the necessary fibre optic cables to Europe and North America so that the information can flow freely and fast.
Iceland has suffered in recent months from the financial crisis: four of its biggest banks needed to be bailed out by the government, the value of the kroner collapsed and many people lost their jobs. BBC, Der Spiegel (Eng)
Part of a Google street view of Geneva's rue du Rhone, faces blurred in line with Swiss privacy laws
Geneva, Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Google maps, the application from internet giant Google, just released a new version of its maps application that includes street views, seamless 360° views of the centre of most Swiss cities. Taken by vans that cruised around the city centre taking countless photographs, the project has caused concern around the world because of the implicatons for privacy.
Social network giant Facebook says it will buy FriendFeed, an aggregator startup, for an undisclosed sum, the company announced 10 August. FriendFeed was started in late 2007 and allows users to compile and consolidate information across a broad range of media. Users can assemble updates from blogs, RSS feeds, Twitter alerts and Facebook updates in one place. Facebook says FriendFeed’s four founders, all alumni of Google, will continue to occupy key positions at the merged company. Industry observers note that this appears to be Facebook’s answer to Twitter’s rebuff when the social network tried to buy Twitter for a reported $500 million, according to Reuters. Facebook, Reuters
Steve Jobs of Apple was polite but firm: the time had come for Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, to leave the Apple board of directors because Google’s encroachment of Apple territory had reached the point where Schmidt would have to step out of too many meetings because of a potential conflict of interest. Wired
The Financial Times reports that Yahoo and Microsoft are “on the brink of sealing an online alliance that could create a more formidable rival to Google”, ending 18 months of uncertainty in the Internet world as Microsoft first chased, then attempted to woo Yahoo. The two reportedly are agreeing to share future online advertising revenue but Microsoft will not be paying Yahoo money up front, which was part of earlier proposals. Wall Street Journal
Google has issued a statement in advance of quarterly reporting saying that the online advertising market appears to be stabilizing, after a period in the first quarter of the year where consumers delayed purchases and cut the amount they were spending, reports the Financial Times. Earnings for Q2 are $5.2 billion. The company also said that YouTube is finally starting to get the attention of advertisers and the company expects it to turn a profit but no date for that was given.
To those of you who subscribe to our Google/Feedburner rss e-mail feed, please note that it failed to include several articles from Wednesday 15 July. We’re sorry that you missed them and unfortunately have no explanation for this, but here they are: EPFL mathematicians crack elliptical curve encryption problem, Vaud and Schumacher agree to small dock, shoreline group opposed, Alinghi accused by US club of secretly plotting with Intl Sailing Federation, C0ngo people fail to get Mobutu money, Soldier killed, another injured, in parachute crash
US Embassy representatives in Beijing met with Chinese officials from two ministries in Beijing Friday 19 June to discuss China’s tough new restrictions on Internet access and to ask China to engage in dialogue about the issues raised by the curbs on access. In what the Financial Times describes as a “rare direct intervention by the US over internet freedom, which has steadily risen in importance as an issue between the two countries in recent years” the US State Department is saying that the free flow of information but also trade issues are at stake. China will require all new computers sold from 1 July to have Green Dam filtering software. China 18 June ordered Google to prevent access to web sites outside China, citing pornography concerns. The US-based company has recently overtaken Baidu, the main Chinese search engine. Xinhua
Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer’s current visit to Yahoo country in California has technology and business media speculating that he is meeting with Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz, to try to revive talks to create a search partnership, after discussions fell through in 2008. The two are struggling to gain greater shares of the search market where Google has 64 percent. Reuters
The numbers have been far smaller than those for television, radio and print, but the growth of online advertising has continued upward, in sharp contrast to the other ad markets – until now. New figures released by several groups in the US and the UK show that Internet advertising has either fallen or is flat, with search advertising, notably with Google, doing fine, but not banners and other ads that online companies need in order to make money. New York Times
Switzerland (GenevaLunch) – Google Zeitgeist must be one of the hottest sites around this week, with its 2008 end of the year report out that shows what we’ve all been looking for. In Switzerland, the fastest rising searches are “facebook” and “iphone,” well ahead of “UBS” in the number 9 slot. But that’s not surprising if you consider that “facebook” is only number 6 for searches, with “youtube” and “google” in the first two places. Worldwide, “facebook” is the most popular search term.
