Google said Friday that a Paris court has ruled against it in a lengthy copyright infringement case filed by a French publisher.
The court has ordered the search giant to pay 300,000 euros ($430,000) in damages and interest to French company La Martiniere, which runs the Editions du Seuil publishing firm. The lawsuit charged that Google was infringing on the copyrights of the publisher's books by scanning excerpts to include in its Google Book search results. La Martiniere's argument was that Google should compensate authors and publishers if the company is going to scan and publish their work on its site.
As part of the ruling, Google must also pay 10,000 euros each day until it removes the extracts. Unhappy with the verdict, Google said it plans to appeal, according to Bloomberg.
"French readers now face the threat of losing access to a significant body of knowledge and falling behind the rest of Internet users," said Philippe Colombet, director of development for Google Books in France, in a statement e-mailed to Bloomberg. "We believe that displaying a limited number of short extracts from books complies with copyright legislation both in France and the U.S.--and improves access to books."
The suit was originally filed in May 2006 by La Martiniere and later joined by the French Publishers Association and French authors group SGDL, which had initially asked the court to fine Google as much as 15 million euros, according to Reuters.
This suit is just one of several filed by publishers and authors upset with Google posting excerpts of their books online without fairly compensating them. In 2008, Google lost a lawsuit filed by the Authors Guild and was ordered to pay authors and publishers $125 million as compensation. An amended agreement in November clarified certain changes and updates to the settlement.
But objections to Google's book digitizing projects have been especially strident in Europe, forcing the company to make concessions to European publishers over which books it will and will not scan and publish online.
Following modifications to its "First Click Free" policy that gives Google News users access to some content that would otherwise be behind a pay wall, Google has released an additional tweak that lets publishers decide whether they want their sites to show up in Google News, Google Web search, both, or neither.
Previously, if a publisher wanted to request inclusion in one or the other, but not both, sending a request to Google was required. This now automates the process.
These updates to Google's news indexing come at a time when media outlets are once again pointing fingers at the search giant as a revenue suck--and in response, Google insists it's good for publishers because it drives traffic. News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has made concrete threats that he will pull his publications' content from Google and is reported to be in talks with Microsoft to strike an exclusive deal on its Bing search engine.
By offering more flexible options for choosing where exactly news outlets want their content to appear, Google comes across as friendlier and less authoritative--at least on the surface.
The Internet offers everything from searching to shopping to social networking, but Net users still spend most of their time on plain old content sites, according to a survey from the Online Publishers Association.
In the latest installment from its monthly Internet Activity Index, the OPA reported that Internet users are now spending 42 percent of their time online using content sites, more than any other category. That figure represents a 24 percent jump from 2003 when Net users spent 34 percent of their time on content sites.
Content sites include those that offer news, information, and entertainment, such as NYTimes.com, ESPN.com, MapQuest.com, and Edmunds.com.
Analyzing five different categories--commerce, communications, community, content, and search--the OPA also found that people are gravitating to community sites, such as Facebook and LinkedIn, at the expense of communication sites or software that provide just e-mail or instant messaging.
"In 2008, we introduced the Community category based on the emergence and popularity of sites like Facebook, MySpace and LinkedIn," Pam Horan, president of the OPA, said in a statement. "These new sites have had significant impact on the Communications category, which saw a 41 percent decline, due to the fact consumers are using Community sites where they can conduct these same activities more efficiently."
Among the other categories, people spend 5 percent of their time on search sites, up slightly from 3 percent in 2003, and 13 percent of their time at commerce sites, down from 16 percent five years ago.
The OPA also tracked how much time per month, on average, that people spend in a particular category. Net users will stay almost 7 hours at a content site, around 3 hours at a community site, and just under an hour at a search site.
Launched in 2003, the Internet Activity Index is conducted and compiled by Nielsen Online and posted online each month at the OPA Web site.
Songwriters, composers, and music publishers are making preparations to one day collect performance fees from Apple and other e-tailers for not just traditional music downloads but for downloads of films and TV shows as well. Those downloads contain music after all.
These groups even want compensation for iTunes' 30-second song samples.
In the future, Apple may be required to pay licensing fees to ASCAP and BMI for the downloads of TV shows and films it sells.
(Credit: Apple)At a time when many iTunes shoppers are still fuming over Apple's first-ever increase in song prices, the demands by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), and other performing-rights groups, would likely lead to more price hikes at iTunes. For many, this would also undoubtedly confirm their perception that those overseeing the music industry are greedy.
For those reasons, composers and songwriters will struggle to sell their case to the public. But these royalty-collection groups say they're at the bottom of the music-sector food chain and aren't trying to gouge anyone. They say their livelihoods are threatened and wonder why movie studios, big recording companies, TV networks, and online retailers are allowed to profit from their work but they aren't.
"We make 9.1 cents off a song sale and that means a whole lot of pennies have to add up before it becomes a bunch of money," said Rick Carnes, president of the Songwriters' Guild of America. "Yesterday, I received a check for 2 cents. I'm not kidding. People think we're making a fortune off the Web, but it's a tiny amount. We need multiple revenue streams or this isn't going to work."
An Apple spokesman declined to comment.
ASCAP and BMI have their sights set on collecting fees from three main areas: downloads of music; downloads of films and TV shows, and 30-second song samples.
In case you don't know the lingo of music licensing, here are some important definitions. When music is performed in public, say at radio stations, restaurants, or sports stadiums, groups such as ASCAP and BMI collect fees and pass them on to composers and songwriters. This is different than a "mechanical" licensing fee, which is paid for the right to record or distribute a song (ASCAP and BMI don't collect mechanical fees).
"In the U.S. while we do get paid a mechanical (licensing fee) from ITunes, we are not getting any performance income from Apple yet," David Renzer, chairman and CEO of Universal Music Publishing Group, said in interview late last month with entertainment-industry publication, Encore. "(On iTunes) you can stream radio, and you can preview (tracks), things that we should be getting paid performance income for.
"Also, if you download a film or TV show," Renzer continued, "there's no performance (payment) and typically there's no mechanical (payment) either."
Taking their case to Congress
Apparently, the music industry can't obtain the fees through negotiations. They have begun lobbying Congress to pass legislation that would require anyone who sells a download to pay a performance fee, according to David Israelite, president and CEO of the National Music Publishers Association.
"If you watch a TV show on broadcast, cable or satellite TV there is a performance fee collected," Israelite said. "But if that same TV show is downloaded over iTunes, there's not. We're arguing that the law needs to be clarified that regardless of the method by which a consumer watches the show there is a performance right."
Israelite acknowledges that the legislative efforts to this point have produced little. And they won't produce a thing if Jonathan Potter gets his way.
Potter is executive director of the Digital Media Association (DiMA), a trade group that represents Web music services and media companies, such as RealNetworks, Pandora, and Apple.
He stresses two points.
First, publishers, composers and songwriters do get paid for music inserted into TV shows and movies. A production company must pay a "synchronization" fee for the right to include a song in any show or film. Then, once the show airs or the film is screened, the music guys will require a separate payment from TV networks or studios for performing the music publicly. Israelite confirmed this.
Critics argue this is double dipping.
Israelite makes no apologies. He says that synchronization and performance fees cover very different rights. To illustrate the point, he says not all composers receive money from TV and films. Say, for example, a TV show licenses a popular tune from singer Aimee Mann or the rock band The Fray. Those acts would likely be paid both sync and performance fees. But the person who writes the little-known background music heard during a fight scene may not see any sync money. That's because traditionally, composers of this kind of production music gave away sync rights in the hope they would make money from performance fees.
"This is really a fight about the future," Israelite said. "As more and more people watch TV or movies over an Internet line as opposed to cable or broadcast signal, then we're going to lose the income of the performance. For people who do production and background music, that's how they make their living."
Potter says he is very sorry for those people. But if their income is drying up--this was the second major point he wanted to make--their troubles are not the fault of iTunes, Amazon, or consumers.
"These guys are afraid that the business model is shifting away from public performances to a model of private performances," Potter said. "This is a turf battle. They are saying, 'The songwriters aren't getting paid.' Baloney. Songwriters are getting paid. They're paid sync rights and (mechanical) rights. They aren't getting paid for the public performance in a download because there is no public performance in a download."
Downloading count as a performance?
Whether downloading a song from the Web should be considered a performance is much contested. So far, the courts have sided with digital media companies.
In 2005, ASCAP entered into a rate-court proceeding to set licensing fees for the music services of Yahoo, AOL, and RealNetworks. A U.S. district judge for the Southern District of New York delivered a blow to composers and songwriters by ruling that downloading music from a Web store was not a music performance. On the other hand, the judge found that streaming music was subject to a performance fee.
"The songwriter gets a performance fee if the song is streamed without the video," Carnes noted. "But if it is downloaded within an audio-visual work like a movie we don't get a performance fee--same song, no money."
ASCAP has appealed the decision and arguments in the case will be heard later this year.
Of all of the efforts to collect performing-rights fees, few will likely be more controversial than trying to charge for 30-second samples. These are the previews iTunes offers so users can test drive a song and hear what they're buying. According to sources close to the company, iTunes has acquired licenses to offer the previews but hasn't paid anything for them. According to Renzer's comments, music publishers want that to change.
Potter from DiMA argues that copyright law protects Apple and music stores from being charged performance fees for in-store sampling.
"They are picking on Apple because they say Apple is making a bundle of money," Potter said. "But these companies should be thrilled that Apple and the other services are selling music and generating millions, maybe tens of millions, in royalties."
With micropayments and transaction platforms a buzzworthy sector of the Web right now, it's no surprise that Google would want to get in on the game.
But Mountain View's pitch is a little bit different: the payment platform it plans to build, according to Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, is geared toward newspapers that want to charge for digital content.
Google's plans are detailed in a document the company sent to the Newspaper Association for America. The document, a response to a query from the association, also requested more information pertaining to paid-content models.
"While currently in the early planning stages, micropayments will be a payment vehicle available to both Google and non-Google properties within the next year," explained the document (PDF) posted Wednesday by Nieman Lab. "The idea is to allow viable payments of a penny to several dollars by aggregating purchases across merchants and over time. Google will mitigate the risk of non-payment by assigning credit limits based on past purchasing behavior and having credit card instruments on file for those with higher credit limits and using our proprietary risk engines to track abuse or fraud. Merchant integration will be extremely simple."
This is interesting, as Nieman Lab points out, because Google's plan aggregates payments into a bundle for processing, something that could potentially quell publisher concerns about transaction fees. The plan is very preliminary, obviously.
"The Newspaper Association of America asked Google to submit some ideas for how its members could use technology to generate more revenue from their digital content, and we shared some of those ideas in this proposal," according to a statement Wednesday from Google's PR department to Nieman Lab. "It's consistent with Google's effort to help publishers reach bigger audiences, better engage their readers and make more money."
Google's Checkout product, the online transaction service that would likely be the base for a micropayment system, has been around for a few years now. But it hasn't made a huge dent in far bigger competitor PayPal, and it's also been experiencing some big problems, as my colleague Tom Krazit reported Thursday.
It ought to be pointed out, of course, that Google has been the target of harsh criticism from the newspaper industry (as well as other sectors of the publishing business) for profiting from third-party content. Wall Street Journal editor Robert Thomson went so far as to call online news aggregators (not mentioning Google by name) "parasites or tech tapeworms."
Meanwhile, the payment platform that's been getting the most scrutiny and interest in the tech press these days has been, of course, Facebook's "credits" system. But while Facebook's pitch thus far has been toward nonprofits looking for small donations and game developers selling virtual goods, it's still impossible to discount the fact that Google's micropayments move could be aimed at staking a claim in the same territory.
Note: This post was expanded at 7:09 a.m. PDT. And on Friday morning, the Associated Press reported that Google was one of several tech companies, including IBM, Microsoft, and Oracle--that responded to the Newspaper Association of America request, though the AP story offered no details on those other companies' responses.
A few months ago someone sent me a link to a short story a friend of his had written and posted online. I made the mistake of glancing at it while at work and then got so absorbed I couldn't stop reading until I was done. The story, Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store was so interesting and well written, I just wanted more.
The writer, Robin Sloan, is now working on a book and is appealing to passionate readers like me to help him get it published. He is seeking financial backers via a Web site called Kickstarter, which bills itself as a "funding platform for artists, designers, filmmakers, musicians, journalists, inventors, explorers." (A similar site is called Fundable.)
Sloan's goal is to raise $3,500 before November 1. Less than two days after launching his page on the site he already has more than $2,200 pledged from 73 supporters (including me). The money will be spent on printing. The more money that is contributed, the higher quality the publishing will be.
Since he's planning to write the book anyway, what do you get for your contribution besides a warm-and-fuzzy feeling? Three dollars gets a contributor a PDF copy of the book and the ability to follow along with behind-the-scenes updates. For $11, a physical copy of the book is thrown in. A signed copy comes with a $19 pledge, and for $29 you get your name listed in the acknowledgments. A $39 pledge brings four physical copies of the book.
Sloan's Kickstarter page provides an enticing teaser to his novella, with a written pitch and a slick video (no surprise given that his day job is as vice president of strategy at Current TV, the cable/satellite television network and Web site co-founded by Al Gore.)
The story centers on a digital and occult private investigator--a 21st century Sherlock Holmes. She's a mix of Tilda Swinton and Carmen Sandiego and her Watson is an artificial intelligence-based daemon.
"It's a story set in a spooky, high-tech, mysterious San Francisco," he said in a phone interview on Thursday.
Sloan is no stranger to self publishing. He edited a compilation of essays, New Liberal Arts, earlier this year and sells books on the Kindle. But he is more interested in using the Kickstarter site to cultivate and communicate with supporters than just get funding.
"More than the money it's that early validation that's so valuable," he said. "For any creative project, not just writing, when you are embarking on it one of the fears is 'does anybody other than me care about this?'"
"The idea is that people are casting a vote to say 'I'm interested in this. I want to see you finish this story,' but also 'I'm reserving a copy of the book,'" he added.
The interactive and viral nature of the Web enables artists to reach out to the public in a way that no other medium does. It also means that artists formerly at the mercy of record labels and publishing houses can now turn fans into patrons instead.
A prime example of this is Musician Jill Sobule. She raised $75,000 last year to get an album recorded through her site Jill's Next Record, offering compensation ranging from free admission to her shows for a $200 to a house concert for anyone who pays $5,000 and a chance to sing on the CD for $10,000.
"Corporate patronage, particularly because of the Internet and different social forces, has been thrown into disarray," said Ted Weinstein, a literary agent in San Francisco.
Mozart may have had his patron Austrian prince, but he didn't have Twitter followers or MP3s to share.
"This is cultivating your audience at every step of the creative process, which is wonderful," Weinstein said.
The Internet Archive is enlisting some heavy hitters in its challenge of Google's proposed settlement with book publishers and authors.
Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo are joining with a few library associations to oppose the settlement, Peter Brantley, the Internet Archive's director, told The Wall Street Journal in an interview. The coalition, which is expected to be announced in a couple of weeks, will be co-led by antitrust lawyer Gary Reback, Brantley said.
It's an unusual reunion for Reback, who marshaled industry opposition to Microsoft's efforts to squeeze Netscape from the browser business. Reback, who until 2000 was a partner at the storied firm of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, was responsible for compiling evidence to aid the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust case against Microsoft on behalf of Microsoft's Silicon Valley adversaries. In 2003, PeopleSoft hired Reback in its failed effort to fend off Oracle's hostile $6.3 billion takeover bid.
Reback is the second prominent attorney to be linked this week with the growing opposition to the settlement. On Wednesday, The New York Times reported that Scott Gant, a lawyer with Boies Schiller & Flexner, would act on his own as an author concerned about the use of class action status to lump all authors into the same pool.
Google is digitizing the works from many major libraries, including the New York Public Library and the libraries at Stanford and Harvard universities, and is making those texts searchable on pages with advertisements. The Authors Guild, which represents more than 8,000 authors, sued Google in September 2005, alleging that the company's digitizing initiative amounted to "massive" copyright infringement. The suit was subsequently granted class action status.
Under the proposed $125 million settlement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, announced in October 2008, Google would have the right to show content from books online that are still in copyright but that are no longer in print. In addition, those copyright holders could be paid for online sales of their books.
Authors and publishers may opt out of the proposed settlement, but if they do nothing, they're considered part of it. That includes authors who can't be located.
Google has book-search agreements in place with numerous publishers, but the company hopes that the settlement will permit it to bring many more books into its service. In a victory for settlement opponents, a judge gave authors four more months to decide whether to participate.
Currently, users of Google Book Search are able to view snippets of books online. The settlement agreement would allow Google to make whole pages of copyright works available to online searchers.
A 17-year-old from Michigan has filed a lawsuit against e-commerce powerhouse Amazon after it deleted a book he had purchased for his Kindle device.
The high school student, Justin D. Gawronski, filed suit in a Seattle court along with California resident Antoine J. Bruguier, and they are seeking class action status.
Amazon forcibly (and ironically) recalled copies of George Orwell's "1984" and "Animal Farm" earlier this month after it was revealed that they were unauthorized. Justin Gawronski's complaint alleges that he was reading "1984" as summer reading for an advanced-placement class and had to turn in "reflections" on each hundred pages. With the loss of the digital book, Gawronski claims his page count was thrown off and his notes were "rendered useless because they no longer referenced the relevant parts of the book."
Amazon has declined to comment on the lawsuit, which appears was first reported late Thursday by The Wall Street Journal's Digits blog.
While buyers received refunds for the recalled copies of the Orwell books, the fact that no advance notice was given threw many customers off and created an uproar against Amazon. The lawsuit, for one, alleges that Amazon did not make it clear enough to customers that remote book deletions were a possibility. It also alleges, as do critics, that the company violated its own terms of use.
"The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely is a power no one should have," the lawsuit quoted Slate's Farhad Manjoo as saying in an opinion piece following the book deletions.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos put out a public apology shortly after the fiasco unfolded, but it's not clear how the company's policies will (or won't) change in the future.
This story was corrected at 9:48 a.m. Details are below.
(Credit:
Michaeljackson.com)
Michael Jackson's position in long-time efforts to make the much-coveted Beatles catalog available digitally is one of the most misunderstood aspects in the very complicated negotiations.
The sudden death of one of the world's best known entertainers on Thursday will have no impact on whether songs from the Fab Four will finally make it to iTunes and other Web music stores. Rumors aside, no deals are imminent, music sources told CNET News.
Jackson bought ATV Music Publishing, the company that owned the words and music to 250 Beatles songs, nearly 25 years ago. He sold a 50 percent share in the company to Sony in 1995 and together they operated Sony/ATV. The actual recordings of the Beatles playing their songs is owned by EMI, one of the four largest music labels, and Apple Corp., the company that looks after the Beatles' business holdings and rights.
What that means is that if you want to record and release a version of "Help," then you need to compensate Sony/ATV. A filmmaker wishing to add a recording of the Beatles performing the song to a soundtrack must negotiate with EMI and Apple Corp.
In the latter scenario, Sony/ATV would collect a share of that deal and could veto it since the company owns the copyrights to the music and words. That typically doesn't happen, and to be clear: Sony/ATV has never stood in the way of a digital deal for the Beatles catalog, according to sources with knowledge of the negotiations. Indeed, the sources said that Jackson and Sony/ATV welcomed it.
The Wall Street Journal reported Friday that Jackson was in financial trouble at the time of his death. Jackson borrowed twice against his Sony/ATV stake, according to the Journal story. How that will affect Jackson's stake in Sony/ATV, which was held in trust, is unclear.
"Jackson was incredibly proud of his association with Sony/ATV Music Publishing and his role in the company," said a company representative. "He was a great partner."
Correction: Michael Jackson borrowed against his stake in Sony/ATV, and how that will impact the company is unclear.
OpenCalais, a Thomson Reuters project to improve electronic publishing by adding computer-readable labels to content, has attracted the attention of several media publishing organizations, including CNET.
The OpenCalais product, available in a free or a more sophisticated paid form, adds labels to content through a technology called semantic analysis. By adding descriptive labels, computers at least theoretically can understand what they're processing beyond just the raw text in a news story or photo caption, for example by recognizing addresses or names.
CNET, publisher of CNET News, is using OpenCalais' service to augment its product reviews and news, the companies plan to announce Thursday. CNET will use the technology to improve features such as searching, spotlighting content related to what a reader is viewing, and enabling programmatic use of its content over the Web.
Others using the technology include The HuffingtonPost and DailyMe, two other online news sites. DailyMe automatically sends its content through OpenCalais' servers, which labels the content with categories such as people, medical conditions, or companies and with specific elements of those categories, said Neil Budde, president and chief product officer.
"It allows us to build picture of news user's behavior to implicitly personalize the site for them," Budde said, adding that automated personalization features are scheduled to arrive in about a month. The company plans to license its service to other news sites, he added, and improve advertising targeting based on the same personalization information.
A closely related technology, the semantic Web, in which elements of Web pages are labeled with computer-readable coding to help computers better understand the meaning of the content, has been around for years. It's only now beginning to gain adoption as a real-world technology because of two big reasons, though: Yahoo and Google.
A year ago, Yahoo announced its search engine had begun recording semantic Web tags and could spruce up those pages' appearance in search results through Yahoo's SearchMonkey technology. Then, in May, Google announced a similar move with both indexing and display of pages in search results. OpenCalais, however, offers technology that creates online content that search engines discover through conventional means of analyzing text.
The tagging seems to help search engines find the company's content and spotlight it in search results, Budde said. "We create a lot of topics pages on the fly based on entities that come in from Calais, and those get pretty good pickup through search engines definitely," he said.
Paul Perry, The Huffington Post's chief technology officer, has begun using OpenCalais' service in the company's publishing system. When a story mentions a specific location or company, for example, OpenCalais' service suggests to editors the ability to associate the story with a specific geographic location or to add a specific company's stock ticker, Perry said.
That explicit labeling makes it easier for local editors--Chicago so far is the only city with localized Huffington Post news, though more areas will arrive this summer--to spot geographically relevant information, he said. "For us, local is super important. We're doing a ton of work for it," he said.
Semantic technology fans will convene starting June 14 for the Semantic Technology Conference in San Jose, Calif., at which Thomson Reuters' Tom Tague is scheduled to deliver a keynote speech.
