Ars Technica:

Yesterday, Judge John Sprizzo of Manhattan approved a lawsuit settlement between Google and book authors and publishers. In what can only be seen as a huge win for both Google and publishers, Google will pay out $125 million into a fund for copyright holders and be granted the right to put millions of out-of-print texts online. The settlement provides a glimpse into the financial terms of a deal that may see the search giant become a significant retailer of out-of-print books.

The lawsuit dates to the launch of Google Print back in 2005, when Google entered the scan-and-publish arena. At the time, its digitizing efforts were described as massive copyright infringement, since the results were made freely available online. The suit attracted the Author’s Guild as well as five major publishers: McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin, John Wiley & Sons, and Simon & Schuster. It eventually reached class action status.

The settlement approved today remains preliminary. A June hearing will determine whether the agreement is fair, reasonable, and adequate. Should it pass that hurdle and become a settled class action suit, Google will be able to operate Google Print without fear of future legal action.

The Authors’ Guild calls the deal “the writers’ equivalent of ASCAP.” They have gathered documents together in a Settlement Resources Page. When the deal was announced last month,  Larry Lessig spent some time studying it before posting his reaction to it: Read the rest of this entry »

Video chatting from Gmail is as easy as sending an instant message. With our team spread out across Google offices in Sweden and the U.S., it’s been really handy in helping us work together. Just click on the new “Video & more” menu in a Gmail chat window and select “Start video chat” or “Start voice chat.” You can switch to a full screen view or pop out the chat window and change the size and positioning as you wish. Of course, not everyone has a webcam, but even if you don’t, you can still have voice conversations alongside your email and regular chat.

Tech Crunch:

Google and other tech companies won a big battle in Washington today. In an Election Day meeting, the FCC approved the unlicensed use of “white spaces” spectrum newly freed up as a result of TV broadcasters going from analog to digital broadcasts. Google has long been leading the lobbying effort to turn this spectrum into a sort of WiFi 2.0. Telecom companies and sports leagues opposed opening up the spectrum, claiming that it would interfere with wireless headsets and other devices that use nearby licensed airwaves.

Google argued that the interference argument was bunk, and the FCC agreed. Although the FCC is requiring more testing before “white spaces” devices will be approved. This is a big win not just for Google, but for the entire tech industry. Just as WiFi changed the way we connect to the Internet in our homes and offices, the “white spaces” spectrum could be used for longer-range wireless broadband connections.

Google co-founder Larry Page:

I’ve always thought that there are a lot of really incredible things that engineers and entrepreneurs can do with this spectrum. We will soon have “Wi-Fi on steroids,” since these spectrum signals have much longer range than today’s Wi-Fi technology and broadband access can be spread using fewer base stations resulting in better coverage at lower cost. Read the rest of this entry »

If elected, Barack Obama will be the first truly independent President of modern times without a large debt of gratitude to big business and financiers. For the nearly two grueling years of campaigning, he is carried aloft by millions of ordinary people and financed for the most part by contributions of less than $100. His debt is to the people.

Obama has already made history not because he is black but because he has signposted an inspiring electoral process truly based on people’s involvement. He has clearly demonstrated that a politician does not have to sell his soul to big money.

He may or may not succeed as President but there is a real and profound reason for hope. He will be the first US politician at any level who is not in moral or financial obligation to big money, big business, aggressive religion, powerful labor unions or feisty non-governmental groups.

Even among Democrats, he is in hock neither to the liberals nor the traditional establishment. His beliefs may be left, centrist or right at times depending on the issue, but he is sold out or subject to no specific sphere of influence.

Some may perceive this as Teflon Obama on whom nothing sticks because he is committed to nothing in particular. Yet if he wants, he can be a truly independent actor taking decisions on the merits of each issue. Hopefully, he is such a man of character rather than one afraid to take decisions.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog:

Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers announced today that they had settled their longstanding legal battle over Google’s mass scanning of books. Under the terms of the deal, Google will pay $125-million to establish a Book Rights Registry, to compensate authors and publishers whose copyrighted books have already been scanned, and to cover legal costs.

The settlement, which still needs court approval to go into effect, would resolve a class-action lawsuit brought in 2005 by the Authors Guild as well as a separate lawsuit filed on behalf of the publishers’ association. Publishers and authors argued that Google’s scanning of books for its Google Book Search program was a flagrant violation of copyright law’s provisions governing fair use.

“We had a major disagreement with Google about copyright law,” Paul Aiken, the guild’s executive director, said during a joint teleconference that Google and the publishers held with reporters today. “We still do, and probably always will.” But he said that the parties had been “able to set those issues aside” for what “may be the biggest book deal in U.S. publishing history.”

The deal goes far beyond money. Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the publishers’ association, described it to reporters as “breathtaking in scope, groundbreaking for publishers and authors, and trailblazing for intellectual property in general.”

BUT:

The settlement left unresolved the question of whether Google’s unauthorized scanning of copyrighted books was permissible under copyright law.

I’ll be eager to see what some of the key copyfighters have to say.

First up is Google’s US Voter Info site, which is just a version of Google Maps with integrated voter information. Users can enter their addresses in order to find their designated polling place, and even get directions right from the map. If it can’t find a polling location for your address (which, curiously, it could not for mine smack dab in the middle of Chicago), it will suggest getting an absentee ballot for your state with a link directly to where you can find obtain one. It’s really quite handy if you’re not in the mood to go digging around website after website in order to find out where to go on November 4.

Even more useful is a US Voter Info Gadget that can be embedded into any third-party website or blog. The module is just a shrunken-down version of the above map, and again allows you to enter your address in order to find the closest voting location.

The latter didn’t work for him but it found my rural Georgia voting place. Here’s the Official Google Blog post about the services.

While Google is officially neutral, CEO Eric Schmidt is campaigning this week on behalf of Barack Obama. This will be his “first time on the trail;” he says this is a “natural evolution” from his role as an informal adviser to the Obama campaign.

At The Machinist Cyrus Farivar notes:

Schmidt is the second high-ranking Googler to make such an endorsement, with Vint “I actually co-invented the Internet” Cerf making a similar endorsement last week.

But the question remains: What does Google or Schmidt himself stand to gain from backing Obama? Probably quite a bit.

Aside from being the text-message candidate, and the video game ad candidate, it’s clear that Obama fundamentally understands technology like you and I do, and not like Grandpa McCain is trying to. That’s why Obama said, way back in November 2007, that he wants to create a Cabinet-level position of chief technology officer.

So who might fill that spot? Business Week has come up with a Short List for U.S. Chief Technology Officer. Cerf’s on it:

Among the candidates who would be considered for the job, say Washington insiders, are Vint Cerf, Google’s (GOOG) “chief internet evangelist,” who is often cited as one of the fathers of the Internet; Microsoft (MSFT) chief executive officer Steve Ballmer; Amazon (AMZN) CEO Jeffrey Bezos; and Ed Felten, a prominent professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University. An Obama campaign spokesman did not return phone calls seeking comment about potential CTO candidates.

TechCrunch has a poll up asking Who Should Be CTO of the USA? (At this writing, Larry Lessig’s in the lead.)

WORTH REMEMBERING — Last summer Timothy Lee at TechDirt wondered, do we need a national CTO?  While Back in February when Steve Kroft asked Obama on 60 Minutes about his lack of executive experience, he compared himself to Google:

“Well, I’ve run my Senate office. And I’ve run this campaign,” the senator replied. “One of the interesting things about this experience argument is that it’s often posed as just a function of longevity. You know, ‘I’ve been here longer.’ Well, you know there are a lot of companies that have been around longer than Google…but Google’s performing.”

CNet News Webware:

Google’s personalized homepage, iGoogle, is getting an update today. Widgets on the page can support a new “canvas view,” which expands the widget to the full iGoogle window. The sixteen new or updated widgets that Google is promoting today support this feature. There are over 40,000 iGoogle widgets available, iGoogle group product manager Jessica Ewing told me.

40,000??? That’s a lot of widgets…

The Official Google Blog:

Not all of our gadgets have canvas views yet, but here are some of the best:

• News - New gadgets from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post give me full-page views of what’s new in the world. Nice.
• Games - The Sudoku gadget lets me play thousands of full-page Sudoku puzzles without squinting at 6-point type. The GoComics gadget gives me my fix of Garfield and Doonesbury and lets me choose from all of their other comics. I’ve also spent many coffee breaks browsing through videos from YouTube and CurrentTV.
• Entertainment - I’ve configured the TV Guide gadget to my zip code and just used it today to figure out when the newest episode of The Office is playing. Flixster’s movies gadget lets me access trailers, ratings, and theater information for any movie. I also use the iLike gadget to browse news, concerts, and free MP3s from my favorite musicians.
• Google stuff - The new Gmail gadget lets me read my full email and perform simple actions like send or reply to emails without leaving iGoogle. Last but not least, a gadget that I authored and use every day is for Google Finance, which provides full-screen finance charts and news of the stocks in my portfolio.

Here’s a full list of our highlighted canvas view gadgets.

More from the LATimes’ Michelle Quinn on overanalyzing the Web 2.0 crew’s video, “20 world Internet citizens met in the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in October of 2008 for a week of reflections on life, love, and the Internet”. The Vimeo version was locked down on Friday:

The online record of the trip was discovered — and spread widely — during a week in which venture capitalists told their companies to tighten their belts and horde cash to help them get through the tough times looming, EBay said it would lay off 10% of its employees and tech companies saw their stocks crater even more deeply than the broader market.

So when the video of the bathing-suited vacationers was discovered, it quickly became too perfect a symbol of Nero fiddling while Rome burns. Or as VentureBeat put it, “Silicon Valley lip-synchs while market burns.” [link]

“The video gave me flashbacks to heedless-partying-until-the-bomb-fell attitude before the popping of the Web 1.0 bubble,” wrote Kara Swisher at All Things Digital, which is owned by the Wall Street Journal. [link]

“This video will always be associated with the end of Web 2.0,” said Michael Arrington at TechCrunch. [links here and here]

Dan Frommer of Silicon Alley Insider said he wasn’t sure whether the video was a great example of Web 2.0 tools at their best or a cry for help. [link]

Of course, it’s not fair to hold up a video of adults on a vacation they had planned long ago (and presumably paid for themselves) as an example of the end of the roaring bull market. This is no AIG situation, in which the insurance giant’s employees were taking a junket to Southern California’s swanky St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach while the government was bailing out the company to the tune of $85 billion.

I’m with Michelle! I figure those kids have lost a great deal in this crisis. I’m glad to see the sunny optimism of young capitalists. And I thoroughly enjoyed their fun video. But I suggest you watch it now before it’s pulled again.

Maybe they should build a version for bloggers…

AP:

If you’re the kind of person who types tipsy and regrets it in the morning, Google’s “Mail Goggles,” a new test-phase feature in the free Gmail service, might save you some angst….

The feature requires you to solve a few easy math problems in short order before hitting “send.” If your logical thinking skills are intact, Google is betting you’re sober enough to work out the repercussions of sending that screed you just drafted.

And if you can’t multiply two times five, you’ll probably thank Google in the morning.

Goggles is in the “Google Labs” section of your GMail settings. You can set the days and times you want it to be active. And the level of difficulty for the math problems.

Here’s the Google Blog entry about the feature.

Via The Chronicle’s Wired Campus, “The tool is named after ‘beer goggles,’ the slang term college students use to describe how inebriation can make a potential mate seem inexplicably attractive.”

Michael Arrington says some sites are using Google Trends to guide editorials.

Google Trends gives you a snapshot of what queries are hot right now. Arrington says he’s hearing that more and more blogs, mainstream media sites, and others are tailoring their stories to the Google Trends daily summary to build traffic.

Here’s how it works:

Let’s say I run a popular political or celebrity gossip site (two topics that pop up a lot on Google Trends). I look for hot queries that people are typing in right now, for whatever reason. Then I write a blog post, making sure to use the query term in the title of the post (which weights heavier for matching content to specific queries). The content of the article itself is mostly irrelevant, as long as your normal readers don’t gag on it.

Within a few minutes that content is indexed by Google, and the high Page Rank of the site along with the newness of the content pushes it up towards to top of the first page of results. Possibly all the way to the top.

We’re not talking about a trivial amount of traffic, either. One person I spoke with about this yesterday said he can get up to 30,000 extra unique visitors per day just by focusing content on top queries, which is more than enough to dedicate a couple of full time people to the effort.

I’ve debated (with myself) on how “bad” this kind of behavior really is. Sites that do this are clearly exploiting a weakness in Google’s search methodology, but it’s not like they’re engaging in black hat SEO tactics to trick Google into thinking their content is more relevant than it is. Rather, they’re just using their Page Rank heft and cheating a little on the edges.

I’m not going to say which sites I’m hearing are doing this, but you can check for yourself. If you see a headline that seems a little off topic or weird, followed by some very hastily written content, have a quick look at Google Trends and see if the exact query is in the title of the post or article. You may be surprised at who’s taking advantage of this.

As part of their 10th birthday celebration, Google has brought back its index circa January 2001. Tech Crunch:

The portal has all the trimmings from the old site, including the goofy logo (complete with exclamation point), a missing “I’m Feeling Lucky” button, and the not-so-modest claim of having indexed 1,326,920,000 web pages…

Because so much of the web has changed since 2001, Google is also including links to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which includes cached copies of pages from that time period. Google says that the site will remain open for one month - after that, it’s history.

Via Andrew Sullivan.

THE MORNING AFTER: Gizmodo’s Matt Buchanan offers up Android and T-Mobile G1’s Five Most Obnoxious Flaws and Wired’s Gadget Lab judges it Neither Open nor Exciting.
+++++++++++
It’s promised to be in 22 markets by commercial launch on October 22nd; by mid-November 27 markets. Wired’s epicenter:

The long-awaited, breathlessly-rumored, Google-powered (and still unavailable until next month) G1 phone was unveiled today with a list price that undercuts Apple’s iPhone by $20 but with few design or software elements that had not been anticipated.

The handset is made by HTC and the service is provided by T-Mobile — but the buzz is all about the completely open source Android platform developed by Google, which allows third-party developers to create applications.

Indeed, it was the unadvertised appearance of Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, 45 minutes into what had been a routine presentation, that energized the packed media room. The pair skated onto the stage wearing rollerblades, perhaps taking a cue from the legendary, crowd-pleasing marketing prowess of Apple’s Steve Jobs.

The phone’s website was launched last night and the specs leaked then too. The BBC has an android video tour.

Amazon has partnered with Google to challenge the iTunes store. That’s attractive not least for the 6 million 100 percent DRM-free songs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Eric Allie, Caglecartoons.com

Below is an email from the PPIAC, Professional Private Investigator’s Association of Colorado, to which I belong. “Do no evil” takes on many colorations, it seems.

Not sure how Google wanting to take any and all searches any person does online while using their browser “Chrome” (which sounds in passing conversation a lot like the word ‘Crone’… rather poetically so), so Google can publicly display, translate into other languages, et al, forensics and data investigation from annual fee data bases of criminal records etc, that PI’s engage with online regularly.

Google’s promotional purposes, are not exactly what a PI considers a useful by-product of their work… that data gathering is usually held as confidential and is most often protected by legal statutes.

Wonder what that means for the feds who might use Chrome to gather data. Are you laughing yet at the possibilities for gaffes and freak spillage? Goodness.

You may have heard that Google is introducing a new Web Browser, “Chrome.” If you are tempted to install and use this browser for investigative research of any kind, pay attention to the following quote from the “Terms of Service…”

“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.”

Read the fine print… Your “confidential data” may not be so confidential.