Google Sued by Pornography Publisher Over Image Search
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Google Sued by Pornography Publisher Over Image Search  Porn publisher Perfect 10 Inc. sued Google for copyright infringement last Friday, accusing Google of failing to  remove from its search results thousands of photos posted online (on non-Google sites)without permission from Perfect 10. The lawsuit, which was filed in U.S. District ...
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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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A Belgium court has ordered all content from French and German newspapers represented by the firm Copiepress to be pulled from the Google News Web site.  The Brussels court said the U.S. search engine is in breach of authors' rights and data bank regulations, Expatica reported Monday.
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(InfoWorld) - Google has expanded its controversial book search service to allow people to download whole copies of books in PDF format to their computers, with the ability to print them out. The feature will go live Wednesday at theÂ service's Web site, said Adam Smith, group product manager of Google Book Search and Google Scholar. The books available for download will only be those that are in the public domain and thus not protected by copyright, Smith said. Until now, people have been able to read these public-domain books on the Google Book Search Web site, but not download and print them, he said. Google will not allow downloading of copyrighted books, not even those for which it has obtained permission from the copyright holders to display their full text, Smith said. The vast majority of the public-domain books available for download have been scanned as part of the library project of the Google Book Search service, Smith said. For the project,Â Google is scanningÂ portions of the collections of some of the world's largest academic libraries, including Google partners Harvard University, Stanford University, and Oxford University. However, critics say Google can't scan copyrighted books it obtains from the libraries unless it gets permission from the copyright holders. The issue is at the center ofÂ two separate lawsuits brought against GoogleÂ last year, one by The Authors Guild and three authors, and another one by The Association of American Publishers on behalf of five of its members: The McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, Penguin Group USA, Simon & Schuster, and John Wiley & Sons.ADVERTISEMENTMAKE SOA REAL WITH IBM WEBSPHERE PODCASTStreamline processes and maximize efficiency within a proven service oriented architecture. Take back control of your business processes with IBM WebSphere.
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Google has been sued by adult site Perfect 10 for alleged copyright infringement. Perfect 10&#39;s suit says that Google&#39;s Web search engine allows people to see copyrighted images owned by the company (access
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A California-based pornographer says it is suing  Google for providing illegal access to its website.
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An adult publishing company sued Google last week, alleging a dozen counts of copyright infringement. Perfect 10, a Beverly Hills, CA-based publisher of an adult-oriented magazine and Web sites, asserts that
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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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(InfoWorld) - Google is asking surfers with time on their hands to help it categorize and label the images indexed by its search engine, building a database of knowledge about the contents of the images. The company launched a new online game on Friday, Google Image Labeler, which it describes as "a fun way to help us organize all the images on the Web." In the game, two randomly selected players are each shown the same image, plucked at random from Google's search index, and given 90 seconds to suggest as many keywords or phrases as they can to describe it. They score points if any of their descriptions match. Google's image search engine currently returns results based on captions and other text adjacent to images on Web pages, without reference to the content of the images themselves. The game will allow it to improve the performance of the search engine by returning results based on the players' descriptions of the images. The game is not the first attempt to use volunteer labor to create a database of knowledge: The Wikipedia online encyclopedia and the DMoz search directory two of the better known examples. Google's game, based in part on technology developed at Carnegie Mellon University, is not even the first to use volunteer labor to categorize images: TheÂ ESP GameÂ developed by Luis von Ahn and other researchers at Carnegie Mellon first put players to work tagging its image database in October 2003. Building a database using information provided by volunteers has its risks: campaign groups or pranksters might influence or pollute the raw data by associating an insulting term with the image of a political candidate. The campaign to link the term "miserable failure" to theÂ online biography of U.S. President George W. BushÂ is one example of how this can happen. The ESP Game and Google Image Labeler limit the possibilities for such pranks, since they select players and images at random, and only associate a label with an image if both players independently suggest it. Von Ahn and his colleagues study "human computation," or finding novel ways to put human brains to work. Their work includes Peekaboom, a game which harnesses players' brains to locate objects in images, and Phetch, which goes further than the ESP game by inviting players to create longer descriptions of images. You can also blame them for Captchas, those puzzles featuring sequences of distorted letters that are intended to distinguish between humans and computer impostors. Google says its search engine indexes billions of images. That may make Google's goal of labelling all the images on the Web seem far-fetched, especially since players of Von Ahn's game have only attributed around 17.8 million labels to images since October 2003, according to the game's Web site. However, computer users around the world collectively wasted 9 billion hours playing Solitaire on their computers in 2003, Von Ahn estimated in a presentation to Google staff in July. If they had spent that time playing The ESP Game or Google Image Labeller instead, they could have labelled almost 200 billion images.
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Google Inc. is paying The Associated Press for stories and photographs, settling a dispute with a major provider of the copyright news that the online search engine finds and displays on its popular Web site.
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The Motion Picture Association (MPA) -- the international representative of the movie industry -- has filed a civil suit against Shenzhen Xunlei Networking Technology, which operates a a peer-to-peer file sharing service based in China called Xunlei that's part-owned by Google.
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A nonprofit group charges that Google hosts potentially copyrighted videos on Google Video.
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Web search leader Google Inc.&#39;s   commitment to consumer privacy came under fire from  Privacy International, a British activist group that has  previously singled out Google for criticism.
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A Chinese company is suing Google&#39;s China subsidiary for copying its name, saying the U.S. search engine&#39;s registered Chinese name is too similar to its own and has harmed its operations.
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Policy group cries foul Google continues to fight allegations that it's promoting video piracy. In March, entertainment giant Viacom slapped Google with a $1bn lawsuit over copyrighted videos posted to YouTube, the site Google purchased last fall, and now, the National Legal and Policy Center is asking whether the search engine cum world power is facilitating copyright infringement on its home-grown video-sharing site, Google Video.â¦
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Ogling Google can be a dangerous pastime.
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Google Sues AdSense Publisher over Click Fraud  Google Inc. filed a lawsuit against one of its AdSense Online clients this week, claiming the company defrauded the search company by clicking on its own ads multiple times. The case, filed in Santa Clara County Court, also alleges that Houston, Texas-based Auctions Expert ...