Google absolved of 'crimes against humanity'
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$5bn lawsuit meets its maker Shuka-shuka-shuka-shuka-shuka.â¦
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Google Inc.'s  Web search  advertising is said to be promoting deceptive business  practices, according to Australian legal proceedings brought by  the country's competition authority, the agency said on  Thursday.
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Google Inc. won a major legal victory Wednesday when a federal judge ruled that the search engine's advertising policy does not violate federal trademark laws.
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(InfoWorld) - Google has agreed to post a court order against the company on its Belgian Web site, dodging a potential fine of â¬500,000 ($639,000) per day for not doing so. The court order stemmed from a lawsuit filed by a group of Belgian publications that accused Google of infringing their copyrights by posting articles on its Google News Web site without their permission. The order, issued Sept. 5, required Google to stop posting stories from the Belgian papers. It was also required to post a copy of the court's order on its Web site for five days. Google removed the stories in mid-September but resisted posting the order, arguing that the dispute had already been widely publicized in the press. On Friday it lost an appeal against the order to post the ruling, the Associated Press reported. Google didn't immediately return calls seeking comment. The order now appears at www.Google.be and on the Belgian Google News Web site. The news site now features articles from Dutch and other international news outlets. Google will appeal the entire ruling at a hearing scheduled for late November, according to the Associated Press story. Google News includes headlines and brief summaries of news articles. Users click on a story link to be taken to the publication's Web site, where they can read the full article. This isn't the first time Google has butted heads with the news media. The French news agency Agence France Presse has anÂ ongoing lawsuitÂ that accuses Google of copyright violation for including its stories on Google News without subscribing to the AFP service. Google has also raised theÂ ire of some book publishersÂ for its Google Book Search offering, which allows visitors to view parts of books online. Groups representing publishers have filed lawsuits arguing that Google must ask for permission before scanning and displaying the contents of the books.
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(Article Central) Google Inc.&#39;s recently launched news service in China excludes results from Web sites blocked by that country&#39;s authorities, and has many insiders questioning its promise to &quot;do no evil.
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Google Inc. (GOOG)'s recently launched news service in China doesn't display results from Web sites blocked by that country's authorities, raising prickly questions for an online search engine that has famously promised to "do no evil."    Dynamic Internet Technology Inc., a research firm striving to defeat online censorship, conducted tests that found Google omits results from the government-banned sites if search requests are made through computers connecting to the Internet in China...
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Google has said that the software flaw found in its Desktop Search utility has been fixed. The flaw allowed hackers to view information contained on a PC running the search software.
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SAN FRANCISCO - Google Inc&#39;s recently launched news service in China doesn&#39;t display results from websites blocked by that country&#39;s authorities, raising prickly questions for an online search engine that has famously promised to &quot;do no evil.
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By Kevin J. O'Brien and Thomas Crampton  In the latest example of a U.S. technology giant potentially being called on the carpet in Europe, Google has been warned that it may be violating European Union privacy laws by storing data on its users for up to two years.
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Google has reached an agreement with two groups representing authors and photographers in Belgium that had objected to the way the company indexes and displays their content on its Google News Web site.
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LONDON/BRUSSELS -- Google Inc. has been ordered by a Belgian court to stop reproducing article snippets from French-language newspapers in an unprecedented copyright crackdown over what is a common online practice.
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(InfoWorld) - Google is facing mounting protests from newspaper publishers in Europe, the impact of which could ultimately affect the amount of content available to end users through search engines. The company is due to appear in court on Friday morning to dobattle with the Belgian press, which filed aÂ lawsuit earlier this year accusing Google of copyright infringement for the way it posts headlines and snippets of their news stories on Google News. Meanwhile, in the past two weeks trouble has also stirred up elsewhere. The company was forced to put on hold the launch of its Google News Web site in Denmark last week after newspapers there demanded a system that would allow them to "opt in" to Google's service, rather than having their content trawled automatically, said Holger Rosendal, head of the legal department at the Danish Newspaper Publishers Association. And a Norwegian media group has written to the search giant, objecting to the way that Google posts thumbnails of its members' news photos. "According to Norwegian copyright law, you are not allowed to use photos without permission from the rights holder, so that's the big issue here," said Pernelle Borset, associate director of the Norweigan Media Businesses' Association. The protests highlight mounting concern among some publishers that Google has gone beyond a simple search service to become a powerful media company that profits from the content of others. Publishers of news, books and other content types have filed lawsuits, often charging copyright infringement, to force Google to seek permission before using their work and even provide them with compensation. Google responds that it acts within the law because it posts only snippets of publishers' content, and because the publishers can opt out easily. It notes that it drives traffic to publishers' Web sites, since it links to their publications, and it can help publicize works that might not otherwise be found. Moreover, it says, if search engines were forced to get permission from every site they indexed, search services would not be able to operate at all. "If content isn't indexed, it can't be searched. And if it can't be searched, how can it be found?" asked David Eun, Google vice president for content partnerships, in a Google blog post . "Imagine a library with no index of titles or subjects of the books on its shelves, or no catalogue of the authors who wrote them." But that, critics say, is the point. Google is not a public service like a library, it is a profit-seeking company. Google may not "aggressively monetize" Google News with advertisements, but the site attracts visitors to Google, and visitors mean money. "The exceptions (for fair use) don't really cover what is in effect a commercial service, and that's where they are vulnerable," said Laurence Kaye, a lawyer in the U.K. who is advising the newspaper industry on copyright issues. Google isn't the only company targeted. Copiepresse, the group representing Belgian newspapers, also sent a cease and desist letter to Microsoft Corp.'s MSN division, which promptly removed the Belgian newspapers from its Web site rather than become embroiled in a lawsuit. Copiepresse has said that it may sue others. The outcomes of the various lawsuits, also brought in the U.S. by Agence France Press, the Authors Guild and others, will shape how Google and other search engines can index and display copyright material on their Web sites. For users, they will determine whether search engines continue to give them easy access to such a wide variety of content. Google lost an initial ruling against Copiepresse in September and was forced to remove the newspapers' content from its Belgian search site and from Google News. Google was not present at the hearing, however, apparently because of an administrative error on Google's part. On Friday -- assuming it shows up -- it will defend itself for the first time. The outcome could affect more than Google News. Copiepresse argues that by indexing and caching its members' content, Google is effectively making copies of the works for a commercial purpose, which it says is a copyright violation. It also objects to Google using the material without first asking permission. Those arguments could be applied to other types of content. Search engines index and cache masses of copyright work on the Web without first asking permission. If the Court of First Instance in Brussels upholds its initial judgment, it could make it difficult for search engines in Belgium to operate at all. "The ruling right now means that search engines can't operate in Belgium, because you don't have the right to index copyright pages without explicit permission," said Danny Sullivan, editor in chief of SearchEngineWatch.com. A favorable ruling for Copiepresse could inspire other copyright holders to seek redress and potentially influence how other European countries apply copyright law to search engines. A decision is not expected for some weeks, and Google has also filed an appeal. Google declined to comment on the possible ramifications of the case, but it acknowledged its significance in a posting to the Google blog: "We do feel that this case raises important and complex issues. It goes to the heart of how search engines work," wrote Rachel Whetstone, Google's director of European corporate communications and public affairs. Europe does not have a blanket "fair use" law as the U.S. does, which allows organizations to use content in a limited way without prior permission. Courts typically consider whether the use of the copyright work is commercial, how much of it is used, and what effect the use may have on its value. It was unclear whether other newspapers will file similar lawsuits. Many -- probably most -- go out of their way to be listed on Google News because of the traffic it drives to their Web sites. Google News is a "powerful traffic generator," said Rusty Coats, general manager of TBO.com, the Web site of Florida's Tampa Tribune. The paper gets about 15 percent of its traffic from search engines, he said, although that can jump to 50 percent when there is a hurricane in the area. "The fact that (Google) also gains from increased traffic I see as a kind of levy. Rebelling against that cuts my own throat," Coats said. "Nothing is 100 percent positive, but (Google) is not evil, either." Sullivan, at SearchEngineWatch, said the Belgian papers were able to "band together and force Google's hand" because they operate in a small market. Such action would be more difficult in a larger market, he said, such as the U.S. He criticized the action by Copiepresse, saying it could have opted out of Google's search but instead chose to litigate. "The intention seems to be that they want to be listed in Google, and they want them to share a portion of the profits." But Angela Mills Wade, executive director of the European Publishers Council, said there is wide sympathy in the industry for Copiepresse. "There's a huge consensus among newspapers that the current situation is not sustainable," she said. While some papers will opt for lawsuits, she said, many favor a technology solution that will give them more control. EPC is helping develop a technology called the Automated Content Access Protocol (ACAP), an "opt in" system that will give newspapers more control over how their content is used. Google has offered to join the ACAP initiative but wants the protocol to be based on robots.txts -- a technology widely used by Web publishers to stop their sites from being indexed by search engines -- and not be an entirely new technology, Whetstone said. Meanwhile, it's clear that Google has to better educate publishers. "Clearly, newspapers are upset, but they also have a lot of mistaken assumptions," Sullivan said. For example, Google signed a deal to pay the Associated Press for stories. Other newspapers have been irritated by what appears to be special treatment, Sullivan said. In fact, Google says it plans to use the AP content in a way that goes "beyond the limited uses permitted by copyright laws," possibly for a new service, although it hasn't said how. Other publishers think closer partnerships with search engines could be mutually beneficial. Just this week, several big newspaper chains in the U.S. announced a deal to post classified advertisements and other content on Yahoo Web sites. The goal is to drive traffic to both Yahoo and the newspapers. Google is still primarily a technology company, and technology is something that newspapers are sometimes "horrendously bad at," the Tampa Tribune's Coats said. That opens the door to partnerships, in which publishers take advantage of Google's advertisers and open programming interfaces, for example, while Google makes more creative use of their content using technologies such as RSS feeds, he said. In the meantime, Google may simply have to exclude newspapers and other content providers that it cannot come to terms with, said Andrew Girdwood, head of technical search at BigMouthMedia, a U.K. search optimization company. "Their stated objective is to index all of the world's information," he said. "But there's not really a newspaper that the world couldn't live without." There may, however, be whole countries that Google would rather not live without. Â
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Responding to recent launch of Mahalo.com, Google clarifies that its search engine also uses human interaction.
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By John McBride, The Charlotte Observer, N.C.  Sep. 10--You go to Google and get your search results -- then what?   How do you know whether the sites Google returns can be trusted? You can't. It's you against the world.
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While it looked like Google could walk away from a potentially damaging infringement case against its browser-based Toolbar, a district court judge found the reasoning behind a full Google victory may have been flawed.
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(InfoWorld) - When it comes to protecting the privacy of its users, Google ranks worse than any other Internet company, according to an interim report by Privacy International. The international watchdog group also accused Google of engaging in a smear campaign in response to its findings and demanded an apology. Privacy International's findings, based on six months of research, placed Google at the bottom of 23 Internet companies examined by the group. Google was the only company to earn the bottom ranking for "comprehensive consumer surveillance and entrenched hostility to privacy." Other companies, such as Microsoft and Yahoo, rated slightly better that Google. Microsoft was given a rating of four out of six for "serious lapses in privacy practices." Yahoo was given a ranking of five of six, one better than Google, for "substantial and comprehensive privacy threats." "We are aware that the decision to place Google at the bottom of the ranking is likely to be controversial, but throughout our research, we have found numerous deficiencies and hostilities in Google's approach to privacy that go well beyond those of other organizations," Privacy International said. In particular, the group cited the large amount of data that Google collects about its users and lack of privacy controls. "Google's increasing ability to deep-drill into the minutiae of a user's life and lifestyle choices must in our view be coupled with well defined and mature user controls and an equally mature privacy outlook," Privacy International said. "Neither of these elements has been demonstrated." Privacy International plans to issue a final report in September. Google executives were not immediately available to comment on the report's findings. But an open letter to Google CEO Eric Schmidt from Privacy International Director Simon Davies accused the company of engaging in a smear campaign in response to the group's findings. "Two European journalists have independently told us that Google representatives have contacted them with the claim that 'Privacy International has a conflict of interest regarding Microsoft.' I presume this was motivated because Microsoft scored an overall better result than Google in the rankings," Davies wrote. Google allegedly claimed a conflict of interest exist because one of 70 people on Privacy International's board of advisors is a current Microsoft employee. Davies rejected the charge and listed five critical actions the group has taken against Microsoft, including support for the European Commission's investigation into Microsoft. "Can I be so bold as to suggest that your company's actions stem from sour grapes that you achieved the lowest ranking amongst the Internet giants?" Davies wrote, demanding an apology from Schmidt. This isn't the first time that Privacy International has raised privacy concerns about Google. In 2004, the group filed a privacy complaint over Google's Gmail service with regulators in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Spain, the Czech Republic, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, Ireland, Portugal, Poland, Austria, Australia, and Canada, as well as with the European Commission. To date, Google has rejected concerns over the information it gathers and stores about users. Speaking recently in South Korea, Schmidt dismissed privacy concerns over the data collected by the company, saying users worried about privacy can always choose not to use the company's services. He also said Google deletes information about users after a certain period of time but did not say how long that period is. Privacy concerns about Google have also been raised overÂ the company's acquisition of DoubleClick, sparking anÂ investigation by the U.S. Fair Trade Commission (FTC). That investigation is ongoing. While Google has taken flack from critics for its privacy policies, the company has acted to protect users in at least one case: In January 2006, Google was the only company to resist a U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) subpoena for a random sampling of 1 million Web addresses that users searched for. AOL, Microsoft, and Yahoo did not fight the DOJ's request, which did not seek information that would have identified the users who made the search requests contained in the sample. Ultimately, Google shared a smaller amount of data with the DOJ.
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(InfoWorld) - Search giant Google will propose on Friday that governments and technology companies create a transnational privacy policy to address growing concerns over how personal data is handled across the Internet. Google's global privacy counsel, Peter Fleischer, will make the proposal at a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization meeting in Strasbourg, France, dealing with the intersection of technology with human rights and ethics. Fleischer's 30-minute presentation will advocate that regulators, international organizations, and private companies increase dialog on privacy issues with a goal to create a unified standard. Google envisions the policy to be a product of self-regulation by companies, improved laws, and possible new ones, according to a Google spokesman based in London. "We donât want to be prescriptive about who does that and what those standards are because it should be a collaborative effort," the spokesman said. Other organizations have already made progress on privacy standards, he said. For example, Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) created a nine-pointÂ Privacy FrameworkÂ designed to aid countries without existing policies. However, the framework has been criticized for vagueness and only been partially implemented by APEC members, said David Bradshaw, principal analyst at Ovum. E.U. privacy regulations are already more stringent than the APEC's recommendations, which highlights the difficulty in creating a global standard that meets existing regulatory requirements in various geographic areas, he said. "From Google's viewpoint, they can't expect the E.U. and those nations that have higher privacy standards to level down to the APEC standards," Bradshaw said. Google's increasing power in search, Internet commerce and software services hasÂ place its privacy policies under scrutiny. In June, Google said it would delete the data it stores about end-users anonymous in its server logs after 18 months, part of an effort toÂ deflate concerns about privacyÂ raised by a European Union (E.U.) working group composed of data protection officials from 27 countries. Google took a further battering after itÂ acquired DoubleClick, an online advertising company that uses technology to track user trends in order to serve them targeted ads. The technology, also used by many other Internet advertising companies, has raised privacy concerns. A European consumer group, Bureau EuropÃ©en des Unions de Consommateurs asked the European Commission in July as well as other authorities to investigateÂ how the DoubleClick deal would impact consumers. The focus on privacy by governments and individual Internet users has resulted in localized legislation, causing a fragmentation in privacy regulations, Google's spokesman said. That can make it difficult for e-commerce businesses, as an increasing amount of data is routinely crossing international borders through credit card transactions, he said. "We really hope that this sparks a sustained, thoughtful creative debate, he said. Â