Webware

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--As Google closes in on a November 9 deadline to submit a revised settlement in the Google Books case, it continues to pull out all the stops to reassure the world it has the best of intentions.

The controversy over Google's settlement with groups representing book authors and publishers rages on, almost a year after it was first reached. After Google was sued in 2005 for digitizing books without explicit permission, it reached a proposed settlement in October 2008 that would give it unique rights to scan out-of-print yet copyright-protected books, exciting some librarians but raising the ire of many within the publishing and literary communities.

Nevertheless, Google has made painstaking attempts to engage with its enemies in the publishing world. Dan Clancy, engineering director for Google Books, has traveled the country meeting with opponents and supporters, patiently explaining Google's position and preaching the value of a publicly available archive of digital books.

On Thursday, Google hosted a group of four librarians from Europe, where Google has signed partnership agreements with five libraries to discuss the benefits of the project. The settlement is obviously a U.S. matter, but the contentious issues in the settlement do not exactly apply to Europe, because Google says it has not scanned out-of-print but copyright-protected books published in Europe.

Therefore, in Europe Google has only scanned public domain works held by its library partners and books for which it has negotiated scanning rights with rights holders. Still, the settlement process is being watched closely by European authors who have had books published in the U.S., as well as European librarians who are a little jealous over the resources their American counterparts could enjoy under the settlement.

"It's like everyone in the U.S. gets to use cell phones and I'm stuck with a landline," said Sarah Thomas, Bodley's librarian and director of Oxford University's Library Service. "It's a tremendous barrier to advancing knowledge."

Make no mistake: getting this settlement finalized is easily one of Google's highest priorities of the year. There are financial incentives--Google will host links to book stores and place ads on the search result pages--but this is also a core part of Google's mission to organize the world's information.

Even the hardiest Google opponents agree that a digital library of the scope Google is proposing will have tangible benefits for the world. This is especially true for the European libraries, which store books dating as far as the 17th century that are crumbling with the advance of age. Few people are able to see those books because of their value and the remoteness of their location, but putting them online could allow the world to read books they would have once traveled thousands of miles to see, allow researchers from around the world to study their contents, and preserve the knowledge for future generations.

But some, such as German Prime Minister Angela Merkel, are wary about a single company controlling such a library. "The German government has a clear position: copyrights have to be protected on the Internet," The Guardian quoted her as saying last week.

In any event, at the moment European libraries are on the outside when it comes to unlocking the knowledge stored in the millions of out-of-print but copyright-protected books on their shelves. Google's argument all along in the U.S. has been that it was allowed to scan those types of books under fair-use laws, which was disputed by authors and publishers in 2005 but authorization to do so is a key part of the proposed settlement.

Copyright laws vary across Europe, but the concept of fair use generally does not exist, and most books are protected by copyright for 70 to 80 years after the death of the author, the librarians said. Historical works are in the public domain, but that's just a fraction of the overall number of books stored in libraries throughout the world.

Out-of-print books will only be available as limited previews to searchers with links to stores at which they can be bought, but those books will be part of a database that is available to researchers and librarians through an institutional subscription. Researchers outside the U.S. won't have access to that database, which means U.S. libraries and universities would have an advantage.

"We ask our researchers what they want, and they say, 'we need a Google Books European settlement. We need access to books that are out of print but are still in copyright,'" said Klaus Ceynowa, deputy director general for the Bavarian State Library in Germany.

Manuela Palafox, head of digital editions at the University of Complutense of Madrid, Spain, took it a step further. "The most important thing in Europe is to review our copyright laws. We need to adapt it to the digital age."

This, of course, is part of the opposition to Google's settlement in the U.S. Instead of leaving it up to Congress to reform U.S. copyright laws to settle once and for all whether digitizing out-of print but copyright-protected books should be allowed, the settlement is granting that unique sweeping right to a single corporation, and forcing others who may want to digitize these books to cut licensing deals with an organization funded by Google and staffed by directors picked by the groups representing authors and publishers.

So while Google works feverishly on a new settlement in the U.S. ahead of a November 9th deadline, its legal battles may be just beginning. Chinese authors are reportedly gearing up to oppose Google's efforts, and its mission of organizing the world's information may be stymied if European copyright laws forbid the digitization of a huge swath of books published in the last century.

Much of the discussion around Google's proposed book settlement has centered on copyright law and competition. Advocates for access got their say Thursday.

A coalition of civil-rights and disability groups in favor of Google's book-scanning project held a press conference Thursday to marshal support for improving access to knowledge, the key benefit of Google's deal with authors and publishers to create a new kind of digital library. They fear that a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to gain digital access to knowledge previously stored in libraries at expensive universities or rich communities could be hampered by the opposition to the settlement from some authors and privacy advocates.

Companies and organizations are rapidly lining up on either side of the proposed settlement, reached last October, after Google was sued in 2005 for scanning out-of-print works without explicit permission from rights holders. The deadline to submit comments has been extended to next Tuesday as the result of the last-minute realization that the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York had planned to take its servers down for maintenance over the holiday weekend, though the deadline for authors to opt out of the settlement remains Friday.

Those opposing the settlement have perhaps protested most loudly over the past six months, but Google put together a group of organizations who stand to make huge gains, if the settlement is approved--and not the monetary kind--to make their case on Thursday.

Blind people, for example, have access to a special library run by the Library of Congress that converts print books into formats readable by the visually impaired, but that library--in existence since 1931--only has 70,000 texts, said Chris Danielsen, director of public relations for the National Federation of the Blind. If the settlement is approved in October, it will give "print-disabled" people "access to more books than we have ever had in human history," he said.

Advocates for the blind found themselves on the opposite side of the Author's Guild, one of the parties to the Google settlement, earlier this year, after the guild protested that the text-to-speech reader on Amazon's Kindle could hurt the market for audiobooks, prompting Amazon to give control of the feature to authors.

Settlement supporters like Lateef Mtima, a professor at Howard University, compared the possibility of opening up access to the books to his experiences growing up in Harlem in the 1960s, then transferring to Stuyvesant High School, a specialized school for gifted science and math students. His fellow students at Stuyvesant had already been exposed to a great deal of the literature covered in English classes at the school, making Mtima realize that he had to catch up to be competitive.

Providing digital access to literature and textbooks would allow libraries at all schools to simply maintain PCs, rather than having to devote resources toward acquiring and maintaining books, several supporters argued. Many communities in poorer parts of the country don't have the resources to maintain libraries competitive with those in richer communities, and lack of access to knowledge makes it harder for students in those communities to learn, according to Wade Henderson of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights.

Whether or not Judge Denny Chin is swayed by these arguments remains to be seen, since opponents who believe Google overstepped its bounds by scanning copyright-protected books will likely make the case that two wrongs don't make a right. Still, they underscore exactly what is at stake with Google's library project: a chance to transform the way the world accesses knowledge with an extremely difficult undertaking that few companies or organizations outside of governments are thought capable of matching at the present time.

BERKELEY, Calif.--Google's Dan Clancy had patiently answered question after question regarding Google's' Book Search settlement with publishers and authors until late in the afternoon Friday, when he was finally left speechless.

Louis Trager, a reporter from Washington Internet Daily, asked Clancy what kind of message was sent when Google decided to "copy first and answer questions later." The question--for which there's no safe answer, if you're in Clancy's shoes--perhaps underscored the core of the opposition to the settlement, reached in October, after Google was sued in 2005 for scanning out-of-print works without explicit permission.

If the class action settlement is approved, Google stands to gain control of a priceless asset. Jason Schultz, acting director of UC Berkeley's Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic, called it "the largest copyright-licensing deal in U.S. history:" the right to display the contents of out-of-print books that are still covered by copyright protection.

Google, however, has already scanned more than 10 million books. At the moment, it's not allowed to display more than a few snippets of copyright-protected books for which it doesn't have an explicit agreement with the rights holders. If the settlement is approved, Google will suddenly flip a switch and offer full-text searches of those books, as well as links to bookstores.

Nothing vexes Google's opponents more than the fact that the company assumed that it had the right to digitize nearly 100 years of written material without serious negotiations with those rights holders until it was sued. Authors have until Friday to decide if they want to opt out of the settlement and preserve the right to sue Google on their own for digitizing their book without their permission, though they can tell Google to remove their books from the Book Search archive, even if they remain in the class.

Everyone agrees that a searchable digital library of out-of-print books would be a very valuable asset for the world. As any owner of an e-book reader such as Amazon.com's Kindle will tell you, the way we think about books is changing.

Think about it: libraries offer tons of out-of-print books, so it's not like the collective knowledge of those books is inaccessible. Yet that knowledge exists in millions of hard-bound individual silos.

What if we could make all that knowledge instantly accessible from anywhere in the world? And more importantly, what if researchers have the ability to analyze it?

Amazing gains could be made in fields like linguistics. In dismissing arguments that scale makes a search engine better, Google's Hal Varian told me last month that one area that does seem to increasingly benefit from scale is translation: the more copies of bilingual books that Google has access to, the more it can perfect its translation algorithm.

"The value of the book as data is greater than value of the book itself," said Peter Brantley, director of the Internet Archive and perhaps the most vocal critic of the settlement. And who will control access to a valuable group of books? A for-profit corporation, which, by the way, paid just $125 million for the license to that information. It paid $1.65 billion for YouTube.

Google likes to say that anyone can cut deals with the Book Rights Registry, the nonprofit organization set up after the settlement to handle payments to right holders, to get similar access to out-of-print yet in-copyright books. The thing is, the number of organizations that can afford to duplicate Google's efforts is limited.

Clancy declined to say how much Google has spent on scanning books, but the Internet Archive spends about $30 for each book scanned. If Google's costs are similar, that's $300 million and counting; there are about 23 million books in the WorldCat database. Microsoft folded its book-scanning project, once it realized that Google was aggressively going after that market, said Tom Leonard, the head librarian at UC Berkeley, which had been part of a book-scanning partnership with Microsoft.

This is what frustrates Google, to a certain extent: everyone agrees that digital access to books is important, yet no one else is willing or capable of doing it. And Google insists that it will be a fair steward of the material: the European Commission has backed Google's efforts, and several university libraries, such as that of the University of Michigan, are also fully on board.

But taking Google at its word requires trust, and trust in corporations is in short supply at this point in American history. It's taken perhaps longer than it should have, but Google is gradually realizing that a fair portion of the public no longer sees it as a cute little Silicon Valley start-up with idealistic stars in its eyes, one that insists "you can make money without doing evil."

Google damaged that trust when it began scanning books without permission, arguing that it was allowed to do so under fair-use laws. Publishers and author groups also harmed that trust when they turned over the key to the castle by bringing the lawsuit as a class action, suddenly making plaintiffs out of millions of authors who did not necessarily appreciate the future value of digital books in 2005, nor authorize the negotiation of the rights to their works.

By the time the reporter caught Clancy off guard, he was understandably drained from a long day spent under hot lights fielding questions, and at least one diatribe, from passionate academics and activists.

The thing is, it's a fair question: Google has the financial resources and collective intelligence to do nearly anything it wants in the world. Where will Google turn its information vacuum next? Will it ask permission first?

Corrected August 30, 10 p.m. with the correct identification of the reporter who posed the question to Clancy.

Is Google ready--or willing--to become a library?

Librarians, academics, and privacy advocates will gather Friday on the campus of the University of California at Berkeley to discuss the implications of Google's proposed settlement with publishers that, if implemented, will allow it to bring millions of books online.

At issue are concerns over privacy, quality, and Google's intent with the project, the only one of its kind in the U.S. to receive the legal authority to scan books that are out of print but under copyright protection--estimated by the Internet Archive to comprise 50 percent to 70 percent of all books published since 1923.

Almost from the day it was announced, the settlement has drawn scorn and scrutiny from authors, library groups, industry associations like the newly formed Open Book Alliance, and even the Department of Justice. Many are concerned that the settlement gives a private organization the sole right to essentially create and control a public good--a digital library--without explicit responsibilities to maintain that public good outlined in the settlement.

And, as UC Berkeley professor Geoffrey Nunberg put it, "this is the last library."

It's going to be extremely difficult for anyone else to create a similar digital library in the future, at least under the current laws. Any other organization that wanted to scan a large percentage of the world's books would likely have to go through a similar legal process that Google has followed for four years to gain access to those so-called "orphan works," a weighty expense even before you start counting the exorbitant costs of scanning the books themselves.

There's a sense among several of those planning to speak at Friday's conference that an Internet corporation--even one sworn to "do no evil"--does not necessarily share the same values and principles that librarians rabidly defend. And left unsaid, but by no means absent, is the growing scrutiny paid this year to Google's dominant position in the Internet search market and how that power squares with Google Books and the publishing industry.

Google's Dan Clancy plans to speak at the event, having been the point man for much of Google's outreach on the settlement. The American Library Association's Angela Maycock gave Clancy credit for listening to the concerns of library groups all year, but he's bound to get an earful Friday.

Big Brother concerns
Expect much of the debate at UC Berkeley to focus on privacy. Public libraries have long been considered anonymous places, where patrons can pursue their interests free from concerns about their browsing being tracked. The Internet, of course, is pretty much the complete opposite environment.

"Is Google going to provide the same kinds of guarantees that users expect, the ability to access books with relative anonymity? The legal document is silent on these concerns," said Michael Zimmer, a professor with the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. "I know the people at Google. I trust them, they are good people, but these are serious things."

Tom Leonard, university librarian at UC Berkeley, agrees. "We want users who use public libraries to feel very comfortable that their identifies will be protected," he said.

Google has a practice of executing innovative ideas far before the implications are visible. But Leonard also sees the upside to the settlement, assuming all the concerns can be addressed.

"We're pretty excited about the fact that the world has changed, and that we can give access the way readers want it," he said. "They want to make full-text searches of everything we have in the libraries."

Universities do have an alternative in the HathiTrust, a digital library project that counts UC Berkeley and the University of Michigan--also a close partner of Google's--among its partners. That service lacks the scope of what Google is potentially entitled to scan, but it curates the material in a fashion that's better suited to the needs of the academic community.

That's good, because at the moment, Google Book Search is almost laughably unusable for serious research, UC Berkeley's Nunberg said. For example, he pointed out that the Charles Dickens classic "A Tale of Two Cities" is listed in Google Book Search as having been published in 1800; Dickens was born in 1812.

Nunberg plans to speak out on the quality issues with Google Book Search, although he readily concedes that the product was not designed for the needs of academics and scholars. But that only underscores the point: if Google Book Search is the only way to obtain a digital copy of a book 100 years into the future, scholars will have to depend on it for research, he said.

So what comes next? Friday, September 4, is the deadline for authors to decide if they wish to opt out of the settlement. It's also the deadline for interested parties to submit their comments regarding the settlement to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, which is overseeing the process.

There are definitely groups like the Open Book Alliance, who will be represented by Peter Brantley of Internet Archive on Friday, which would prefer to scrap the settlement and start over. "Google has a practice of executing innovative ideas far before the implications are visible," said Colin Evans, a "data wizard" at Metaweb and panelist on Friday.

However, it sounds like most of those in attendance are willing to give Google a shot as the digital librarian of the future so long as they adhere to the rules of the club.

"There's a lot of questions about how they will balance (their) mandate as a for-profit corporation and their mission to provide universal access to information," Maycock said. If it really wants to make the controversy over this settlement go away, Google needs to embrace "the ethical framework that libraries operate under," she said.

Disney's ABC Enterprises announced Thursday that it has entered into online-video joint venture Hulu, currently a partnership between NBC Universal, News Corp., and investor Providence Equity Partners.

This means that TV shows from Disney-owned channels like ABC, SoapNet, and ABC Family will be coming to Hulu. Among them are "Lost," "Grey's Anatomy," "Ugly Betty," and "Scrubs." There will also be Disney movies available on the ad-supported streaming video site, but a press release did not name any of them. Content will be available "soon," the press release explained.

Reports started to surface about a month ago that Disney was in talks to join Hulu.

Robert Iger, president and CEO of the Walt Disney Company, will take a seat on Hulu's board of directors, along with Anne Sweeney, co-chair of Disney Media Networks and president of the Disney/ABC Television Group, and Kevin Mayer, executive vice president of corporate strategy, business development, and technology at Disney.

ABC already streams a significant amount of television content on ABC.com, and Disney-owned television and video content was some of the first to make an appearance in the iTunes Store's video download section.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs is Disney's single biggest shareholder, having sold animation studio Pixar to the company in 2006.

This post was expanded at 8:15 a.m. PT.

In five minutes, please walk away from your computer, take out your moral compass, and ask it for an update. Then, please tweet the results.

Yes, after the powerful and persuasive arguments of M'lady Greenfield of England--she who declared that Facebook was making us infantile--we now have further cause to worry about ourselves and our children.

Scientists at the University of Southern California have broken away from their task of finding the next 20 or so great football talents for the university to conduct research suggesting that Twitter may take the nerve endings out of our sense of morality.

Here's how researcher Mary Helen Immordino-Yang put it to CNN: "If things are happening too fast, you may not ever fully experience emotions about other people's psychological states, and that would have implications for your morality."

The idea is that information is coming at us at such great speed that we don't have time to experience the pain or the joy that such information should engender.

Apparently, when scientists scan our brains, they find that we are pretty quick at responding to any sign of physical pain in another human. But we are painfully slow at showing such feelings as compassion or admiration.

In this particular piece of research, the scientists relied on telling people different kinds of stories, and then scanning their brains and asking them to recall the stories, and the emotions attached to them, to see what effect the storytelling might have had.

I have to say that, given my occasional skepticism about research, there were only 13 people who had their brain scanned for this study.

Your brain might, at this point, be scanning the thought that if all the subjects of this research were from Los Angeles, it might be surprising that the scientists found any moral compass at all.

Of course, I couldn't possibly comment on that. I have at least three friends who live there. However, isn't the more general point that the demands of western life seem to have tended toward greater speed for the last 100 years?

Every piece of technology somehow offers a greater speed of something--information, communication, healing, pleasure. Somehow, one has a sense that humans do adjust. (But should they? Should they?)

Surely, any moral compass that exists in our souls is still more heavily influenced by those perennial scourges, like parents, teachers, lovers, social environment and, naturally, reality television.

Sorry. Must go and check my tweets.

OK, I'm back. Mark Cuban just tweeted: "Thought of the Day: "You don't live in the world you were born into" - think about it #FB."

Seems like a pretty moral tweet to me.

If you think the new Google Earth update that shows even more about Mars' surface is cool, Microsoft thinks what's it's about to offer is even cooler.

The company, together with NASA, announced on Tuesday plans to make planetary images and data available via the Internet. The two organizations will jointly develop the technology and infrastructure necessary to make NASA content--including high-resolution scientific images and data from Mars and the moon--explorable on Microsoft's online virtual telescope for exploring the universe, called WorldWide Telescope.

The WorldWide Telescope is a Web 2.0 visualization environment that functions as a virtual telescope, bringing together imagery from ground- and space-based telescopes for a seamless, rich media-guided exploration of the universe. Through WorldWide Telescope and Microsoft technology, people will be able to pan and zoom in on these images and the most interesting locations on Mars and the moon without distorted views at the poles.

For this new project, NASA's Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, Calif., will process and host more than 100 terabytes of data (that's about enough to fill 20,000 DVDs). WorldWide Telescope will incorporate the data later in 2009 and feature imagery from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), which was launched in August 2005.

The MRO has been examining Mars with a high-resolution camera and five other instruments since 2006. So far the orbiter has sent home more data than all other Mars missions combined.

Other than the MRO, images a camera aboard NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, the LRO, will also be incorporated when publicly released this fall. The LRO is scheduled to launch this May and will spend at least a year in a low, polar orbit approximately 30 miles above the lunar surface collecting detailed information about the lunar environment.

Microsoft and NASA have worked together before, including on the project that enabled NASA to develop 3D interactive Microsoft Photosynth collections of the space shuttle launch pad and other facilities at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

Video hub Hulu now lets its members amass friends lists much like a standard social-networking service, the site said Thursday.

You can now invite friends from your e-mail address books or Facebook and MySpace accounts, and then see a feed of what your friends have been watching, commenting on, or subscribing to.

In the event that you find this creepy or don't want your boss to catch on to the fact that you watch reruns of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia all day long you can disable these activity-feed features.

The announcement comes in conjunction with the one-year anniversary of Hulu's public debut. To mark the occasion, the NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture will introduce over the next week a "bevy of new shows, more seasons of user favorites, and classic cartoons and movies."

Also new: a sort of trends page with rankings of the most e-mailed, searched, and embedded videos, as well as editors favorites. Not surprisingly, Saturday Night Live is a huge hit, and the most-searched name on the site is "Palin."

On the less pleasant side of things, Hulu's one-year anniversary comes at a time when the site is dealing very publicly with the invariable old media-new media gulf: pressure from content owners caused the site to ax its support for buzzworthy video software maker Boxee earlier this month.

Media-center start-up Boxee, which aggregates Web video for television set-top boxes, has launched a new version that restores access to video hub Hulu. The NBC Universal-News Corp. joint venture had pulled its content from Boxee after content partners took issue with it.

But it's not really the same: Boxee has brought back Hulu by extending its support for RSS feeds, and is pulling the video content in that way.

"Like IE, Firefox, or Google Reader, the RSS reader supports Google Video, Yahoo, YouTube and feeds from many other websites," a post on the Boxee blog by CEO Avner Ronen read. "While it's not as attractive or robust as our previous Hulu application, it will additionally support Hulu's public RSS feeds."

Industry talks continue, the post continued. "While we don't come from an entertainment or cable background, we are learning quickly. It is a complex business. Our meetings with Hulu and their content providers reinforced that point," Ronen wrote. "They are trying to adjust to a new reality, but they need time."