Concurring Opinions » Google & Search Engines

Still Buzzing, the Under 13 Set

Danielle Citron — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 12:04:41 +0000

Google Buzz thrust itself on the social scene at a particularly auspicious time. Snow had trapped East Coasters in their homes so kids talked to their friends digitally and watched television (usually at the same time). Those over 13 likely spent their time on Facebook, which now seems like a privacy haven compared to its newest pesky social network comrade, Google Buzz. Kids under 13 discovered that Google Buzz hit their Gmail account. It was, for many, their first social network experience: intoxicating, terrifying, and all theirs.

As many parents know, Facebook and other social network sites welcome anyone 13 and older to make friends and become fans at their site. That leaves kids under 13 (at least ones with watchful parents) with a less dynamic online life. Before last week, my kids and their pals communicated via email and Gmail chats, happy to wait until their 13th birthday when they might get a chance to create profiles and network on Facebook (parent approval pending). Then came the Buzz. As parents busied themselves shoveling or trying to work, kids found their Gmail inboxes transformed into garden of online delights. They could post pictures and videos for their contacts (their contacts’ contacts and their contacts’ contacts) to see, and they gained access to everyone’s email list. Status updates from contacts appeared in an endless stream along with wall-like postings.

Aside from the obvious privacy problems that advocates such as Marc Rotenberg make stunningly clear, see here, another arose, one that has received less press. Those under 13 had, and may continue to have, a powerful taste of social networking that they may be ill-equipped to handle. Online communications have a powerful disinhibiting effect. As a result, people do and say things online that they would never do or say offline. This is particularly tricky for young children who have much emotional intelligence to learn. Although I had only a small sample to watch, my friends tell a resoundingly similar story: kids under 13 got swept into a nasty free for all, a melange of bullying, shaming, and privacy-busting disclosures that would make a more emotionally mature crowd cringe. As the recent story of 15-year old Phoebe Prince’s suicide illustrate and that of Megan Meier, online bullying can escalate into serious harassment, inflicting mental distress so serious as to drive the emotionally vulnerable to suicide.

Google Buzz did parents a favor with its shocking jump into social networking, foisted on Gmail users. Since the snow storm has abated for the moment, parents are now probably paying attention to what is going on with their kids. Hopefully, this turns into a crucial teaching moment for families who need to talk about acting responsibly online, to treat others as ends in themselves, worthy of respect, not as objects that we can shame and demean. I know that our house took that opportunity. So should yours.

Hat Tip: Citron gang, Tea Carnell, and Ray Cha

The Secret Behind Amazon and Macmillan’s Fight: Google?

Deven Desai — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 23:17:28 +0000

Many may know about the fight between Amazon and Macmillan publishing. Yes it is about e-books and pricing, and the death of an industry, the death of print, and heck throw in Death in Venice if you like. But the real move may have been to highlight something else Amazon is quite worried about: Google and the Book Settlement.

Would Amazon really refuse to carry all books from one of the largest publishers in the Untied States? As my friend John Scalzi pointed out (He was one of the first to notice the move, because his publisher is part of Macmillan, and his fans asked him why his books were not available almost immediately after Amazon’s move.), Amazon waited until late Friday to remove the Macmillan books. John thought that the timing was probably designed to mitigate any negative responses that might go Amazon’s way. I think John was correct, but I think this statement reveals a perhaps bigger reason for the bluff:

“We have expressed our strong disagreement and the seriousness of our disagreement by temporarily ceasing the sale of all Macmillan titles,” Amazon said. “We want you to know that ultimately, however, we will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.”

Just to repeat it: “Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.” Where else does monopoly and books arise? Ah yes, when Amazon (and others) opposes the Google Book Settlement.

I think this move provides an interesting, concrete example that will be offered to argue that the GBS will provide Google with power equal to or greater than Macmillan’s. The question is, if it is a monopoly as Amazon claims, why aren’t folks attacking all major publishers? Amazon may argue that Google will have a unique position in the e-book market, but those claims require more details if one is to sort them properly.

Education, Technology, and Empirical Data

Deven Desai — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 23:27:19 +0000

I just returned from the Institute for Advanced Study’s Symposium on Technology and Education. Anyone interested in how education operates should contact the folks in today’s symposium or in the year-long seminar The Dewey Seminar: Education, Schools and the State. It is a great group of people thinking about justice, finance, the structure of schools, education and labor matters, whether constitutions address education, and much more. Indeed, it struck me that many of the participants’ work could provide interesting opportunities for collaboration.

Today’s speakers offered some fantastic ideas about the way education works in K-12. One thing that occurred to me was how, in yet another field, data is increasingly important. In many areas, vast amounts of data are being used to understand how a student is performing or where a different type of learning style may be required or whether a teacher is effective, and so on. This point may be readily familiar to those interested in empirical legal studies. Yet, two key issues arise. How does one sort the data? And, how does one interpret the data.

The answer seems to lie in the ability to embrace the Google mindset. Take in data. Study it. Study it. Study it. And see where it takes you. As Hal Varian has described (pdf), “The real secret to Google’s success is that they are constantly experimenting with the algorithm, adjusting, tuning and tweaking virtually continuously.” He compares this approach to “the Japanese approach to quality control is kaizen which is commonly translated as ‘continuous improvement.’” As general matter Varian has offered:

During the 1960s and 70s the scientific study of financial markets flourished due to the availability of massive amounts of data and the application of quantitative methods. I think that marketing is at the same position finance was in the early 1960s. Large amounts of computer readable data on marketing performance are just now becoming available via search engines, supermarket scanners, and other sorts of information technology. Such data provides the raw material for scientific studies of consumer behavior and I expect that there will much progress in this area in the coming decade.

After today’s seminar I am wondering whether “large amounts of computer readable data on marketing performance” could also be written “large amounts of computer readable data on education performance.” It seems like that day is coming, if not already here. We may be entering an era where education is heavily data driven and educators must be able to use new tools to understand and use the data. The challenges regarding privacy, notions of tracking, and fairness will be large. Then again the promise of improved educational outcomes and a system that can reach more students in ways far beyond training them to jump through test-taking hoops suggests that whatever the obstacles, it is worth pursuing the possibilities.

Timothy B. Lee’s “Google Attacks Highlight the Importance of Surveillance Transparency”

Deven Desai — Fri, 15 Jan 2010 21:05:30 +0000

The Google China news deserves some thought for a range of reasons. The questions about democracy, censorship, and more that swirled around Google and China’s relationship are important. One issue that is easily lost is the relationship between the claimed reasons for Google’s leaving China and policies about surveillance. My colleague at CITP, Timothy B. Lee, wrote an excellent piece at Freedom to Tinker about this issue. Ordinarily I would summarize and point folks to the post. It captured my attention so much, however, that I asked Tim whether I might repost it in full here. I am happy that he has agreed.

Google Attacks Highlight the Importance of Surveillance Transparency

by Timothy B. Lee

Ed posted yesterday about Google’s bombshell announcement that it is considering pulling out of China in the wake of a sophisticated attack on its infrastructure. People more knowledgeable than me about China have weighed in on the announcement’s implications for the future of US-Sino relations and the evolution of the Chinese Internet. Rebecca MacKinnon, a China expert who will be a CITP visiting scholar beginning next month, says that “Google has taken a bold step onto the right side of history.” She has a roundup of Chinese reactions here.

One aspect of Google’s post that hasn’t received a lot of attention is Google’s statement that “only two Gmail accounts appear to have been accessed, and that activity was limited to account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line, rather than the content of emails themselves.” A plausible explanation for this is provided by this article (via James Grimmelmann) at PC World:

Drummond said that the hackers never got into Gmail accounts via the Google hack, but they did manage to get some “account information (such as the date the account was created) and subject line.”

That’s because they apparently were able to access a system used to help Google comply with search warrants by providing data on Google users, said a source familiar with the situation, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak with the press.

Obviously, this report should be taken with a grain of salt since it’s based on a single anonymous source. But it fits a pattern identified by our own Jen Rexford and her co-authors in an excellent 2007 paper: when communications systems are changed to make it easier for US authorities to conduct surveillance, it necessarily increases the vulnerability of those systems to attacks by other parties, including foreign governments.

Rexford and her co-authors point to a 2006 incident in which unknown parties exploited vulnerabilities in Vodafone’s network to tap the phones of dozens of senior Greek government officials. According to news reports, these attacks were made possible because Greek telecommunications carriers had deployed equipment with built-in surveillance capabilities, but had not paid the equipment vendor, Ericsson, to activate this “feature.” This left the equipment in a vulnerable state. The attackers surreptitiously switched on the surveillance capabilities and used it to intercept the communications of senior government officials.

It shouldn’t surprise us that systems built to give law enforcement access to private communications could become vectors for malicious attacks. First, these interfaces are often backwaters in the system design. The success of any consumer product is going to depend on its popularity with customers. Therefore, a vendor or network provider is going to deploy its talented engineers to work on the public-facing parts of the product. It is likely to assign a smaller team of less-talented engineers to work on the law-enforcement interface, which is likely to be both less technically interesting and less crucial to the company’s bottom line.

Second, the security model of a law enforcement interface is likely to be more complex and less well-specified than the user-facing parts of the service. For the mainstream product, the security goal is simple: the customer should be able to access his or her own data and no one else’s. In contrast, determining which law enforcement officials are entitled to which information, and how those officials are to be authenticated, can become quite complex. Greater complexity means a higher likelihood of mistakes.

Finally, the public-facing portions of a consumer product benefit from free security audits from “white hat” security experts like our own Bill Zeller. If a publicly-facing website, cell phone network or other consumer product has a security vulnerability, the company is likely to hear about the problem first from a non-malicious source. This means that at least the most obvious security problems will be noticed and fixed quickly, before the bad guys have a chance to exploit them. In contrast, if an interface is shrouded in secrecy, and only accessible to law enforcement officials, then even obvious security vulnerabilities are likely to go unnoticed and unfixed. Such an interface will be a target-rich environment if a malicious hacker ever does get the opportunity to attack it.

This is an added reason to insist on rigorous public and judicial oversight of our domestic surveillance capabilities in the United States. There has been a recent trend, cemented by the 2008 FISA Amendments toward law enforcement and intelligence agencies conducting eavesdropping without meaningful judicial (to say nothing of public) scrutiny. Last month, Chris Soghoian uncovered new evidence suggesting that government agencies are collecting much more private information than has been publicly disclosed. Many people, myself included, oppose this expansion of domestic surveillance grounds on civil liberties grounds. But even if you’re unmoved by those arguments, you should still be concerned about these developments on national security grounds.

As long as these eavesdropping systems are shrouded in secrecy, there’s no way for “white hat” security experts to even begin evaluating them for potential security risks. And that, in turn, means that voters and policymakers will be operating in the dark. Programs that risk exposing our communications systems to the bad guys won’t be identified and shut down. Which means the culture of secrecy that increasingly surrounds our government’s domestic spying programs not only undermines the rule of law, it’s a danger to national security as well.

Update: Props to my colleague Julian Sanchez, who made the same observation 24 hours ahead of me.

Recognizing Bottlenecks on the Net

Frank Pasquale — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:46:43 +0000

Adam Raff’s editorial on “search neutrality” in the NYT today has already provoked critical commentary and schadenfreude. But I found the editorial both informative and compelling. Principles of search neutrality are bound to be more complex than the network nondiscrimination rules made notable in the net neutrality debate. But we must realize (as forward-thinking cyberlaw activists like Sherwin Siy do) that “bottlenecks” at any layer of the internet—physical, social, applications, or content—can be problematic.

Some commentators have suggested that it would be impossible to make search engines as “fair” to the sites they index as cable and telephone companies should be to the customers whose traffic they carry. However, some basic principles of transparency should guide both fields. Raff articulates serious worries about Google’s influence over spheres of internet activity adjacent to search:

With 71 percent of the United States search market (and 90 percent in Britain), Google’s dominance of both search and search advertising gives it overwhelming control. . . One way that Google exploits this control is by imposing covert “penalties” that can strike legitimate and useful Web sites, removing them entirely from its search results or placing them so far down the rankings that they will in all likelihood never be found. For three years, my company’s vertical search and price-comparison site, Foundem, was effectively “disappeared” from the Internet in this way.

Admittedly, Raff likely can’t prove conclusively that Google’s prioritization practices purposefully hurt any particular company, because they are so secretive. I would not be surprised if Google PR responded to this editorial by saying that entirely neutral, albeit private, ranking practices led to the obscurity of Foundem. (For an interesting discussion of that style of justification, see James Grimmelmann’s discussion of Google’s SearchKing litigation.) But that opacity is itself concerning.

Public interest groups have made some inroads in holding carriers accountable, but even they appear reluctant to take the next step to recognize the parallel power of a dominant search engine like Google. They will soon have no choice but to confront this dominance, given that the obstacles to holding Google accountable—trade secret protection for its ordering algorithms—will also interfere with network neutrality regulation. Like search engines, carriers face an information overload problem, as spam, viruses, and high-demand applications threaten to overwhelm their networks. They are likely to make key network management practices as confidential as search engine rankings, and trade secret protection has already been deployed in other technological settings to block critical review of questionable corporate behavior.

Dominant search engines and carriers are the critical infrastructure for contemporary culture and politics. As these dominant intermediaries have gained more information about their users, they have shrouded their own business practices in secrecy. Internet policy needs to address the resulting asymmetry of knowledge and power. I’m glad to see people like Raff bringing these concerns to a public forum. Consider, for instance, the problems he identifies here:

Another way that Google exploits its control is through preferential placement. With the introduction in 2007 of what it calls “universal search,” Google began promoting its own services at or near the top of its search results, bypassing the algorithms it uses to rank the services of others. Google now favors its own price-comparison results for product queries, its own map results for geographic queries, its own news results for topical queries, and its own YouTube results for video queries. . . . Without search neutrality rules to constrain Google’s competitive advantage, we may be heading toward a bleakly uniform world of Google Everything — Google Travel, Google Finance, Google Insurance, Google Real Estate, Google Telecoms and, of course, Google Books.

In my 2007 article Copyright in an Era of Information Overload, I presented Google as a company that could break the dominance of concentrated cultural industries, joining a chorus of cheerleaders for “disintermediation.” However, as Google becomes more of an online conglomerate, it may create problems in new areas similar to the ones it once helped solve. Consider the complexities caused by Google‘s ownership of YouTube. Does the fact that a company does business with Google lead Google to make it more salient in search results than a company that (ceteris paribus) does not? How well are YouTube‘s rivals doing in searches on Google for videos?

Again, Google may have perfectly legitimate reasons for ranking YouTube items on top. (For example, if it faces more lawsuits like this, it may want to prioritize its subsidiary’s results because it suspects that YouTube’s “objectionable content police” are more active than upstarts’ bowdlerizers.) But just as Google wants the carriers to be open about how they manage traffic, it should be transparent about exactly how its commercial relationships affect the ranking of its business partners and customers. Without such transparency, regulators will not be able to assess whether the company is engaged in stealth marketing, which can be a deceptive trade practice.

Some commentators may say that principles of search neutrality are impossible to specify. I agree with Greg Lastowka’s concerns about Raff’s own ideas about search neutrality. But if you want to see a more precise specification of what search neutrality might look like, just look at page 27 of my article comparing dominant search engines and carriers. Or the series of comparisons in the chart on this page. Or take a look at Dawn Nunziato’s discussion of Google News in her book, Virtual Freedom. Siva Vaidhyanathan also has interesting insights. Thankfully, I’m no longer a voice crying in the wilderness on this issue. As Viva Moffat shows, there is a wide range of opinion on regulating search.

PS: More discussion at TPM, Marketing Pilgrim, and Business Edge.

X-Posted: Balkinization.

Are T.V. Programs Killer Apps?

Deven Desai — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:36:46 +0000

Networks. In my youth, the term was most familiar to me as the word for large, national television stations. NBC was at the bottom of a small heap in the late 1970s. If I recall correctly, Johnny Carson and the Tonight Show supported most of the network in general. Now remember, there were only three networks and some local stations, yet NBC was unable to do well. Then NBC tried a show that I believe many thought would not work or have little success, The Cosby Show. Who knew? That show took off and NBC parlayed The Cosby Show into 20 years of dominance. Family Ties was OK but nothing brilliant. Nonetheless, with Cosby as the anchor, NBC tested and launched series such as Cheers, Friends, and ER with Wings and other decent fillers in between. In a sense NBC seemed to have cross-subsidized its programming on Thursday and even other nights (by launching and then moving series). In addition, that lead allowed NBC to promote all its other programming. Then came CBS which was in the doldrums and it tried a little thing called Survivor. Boom! CBS took off. Many OK, and some not so good shows have done well on CBS. FOX arguably uses American Idol to achieve similar results. NBC struggles so much that some rather good shows are lost and like the proverbial tree they fall but no one hears them.

The analogy is far from perfect (for one I am not certain that T.V. shows require large numbers to be useful then again they seem to do well in part because one likes to be able to talk about shows around the so-called water cooler), but I wonder if Yahoo!, AOL, Google, MSN, Facebook, and Twitter are in some ways similar to the T.V. networks. One killer app and the site grabs a ton of people who stick and may use other products from the network. Users can click away and can use the services in a simultaneous way in that one can work with one service at time or have multiple services running but not miss programming as was the case before the VCR. There are many open questions in this arena. For one, how easily can one switch from one service to another? In addition, are there similar problems regarding limited access (i.e., T.V. and cable can carry only so many channels but the Internet has greater capacity (though depending on the status of the network not as unlimited as some might argue)? A key issue in my mind is the problem of knowing that a good service or program exists. The Internet appears better than T.V. at letting users quickly decide what they like, and the information seems to spread rather well. Still, I am sure there are great services that I am missing (a recent one that someone mentioned to me was Dropbox). One often doesn’t know what is good until those pesky advertisers and marketers push information. My recent research has been looking into the way trademarks as brands have functioned on several levels, but one thing that jumps out is that brands are two-way information devices. Advertising is a major piece of that puzzle in one direction; the Internet and commentary is a major piece of the puzzle in the other direction (trademark law handles this idea poorly). Ironically, just as T.V. and print cry out because ads are being skipped, the Internet steps in and seems to deliver better returns on ads. The new difference is that in some cases those who pay for and create the content that was subsidized by ads are not seeing that money. In other words, as Paul Duguid has shown in his work and I have found in my research, early brands can be understood as having a big role in supply chains; we may need to think of modern networks in much the same way. There are many details and differences to address in the Internet arena, but I think these ideas will be part of how we sort out some of the online competition issues in play today.

Google, The Good: Free Law!

Deven Desai — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:52:56 +0000

Although I have used this space to question the Google Book Deal, I do not think that all The Google does is bad. Indeed, the fundamentals of where the Google Book Deal began were good. And now, as some of you may know, Google is trying to go where no one has gone (successfully as far as I can tell) before. Yes, as of last week, The Google is

enabling people everywhere to find and read full text legal opinions from U.S. federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts using Google Scholar. You can find these opinions by searching for cases (like Planned Parenthood v. Casey), or by topics (like desegregation) or other queries that you are interested in. For example, go to Google Scholar, click on the “Legal opinions and journals” radio button, and try the query separate but equal. Your search results will include links to cases familiar to many of us in the U.S. such as Plessy v. Ferguson and Brown v. Board of Education, which explore the acceptablity of “separate but equal” facilities for citizens at two different points in the history of the U.S. But your results will also include opinions from cases that you might be less familiar with, but which have played an important role.

I like the premise that Google wants to “empower the average citizen by helping everyone learn more about the laws that govern us all.” And I was interested to see that the pagination seems to be accurate. As Google improves features such as signaling whether a case has been overruled (the citation history is there but I was not sure that one could easily tell what a case’s status was in a Shepperd’s or Key Cite way), and improves search so that one can target a document as well as one can on Westlaw or Lexis (which at this stage seem to be still superior to Google’s offering), the service may be a threat to the pay services.

So why would Google offer this service? It may be a commitment to openness. It may be a play for value-added services for a fee for those who currently use Westlaw or Lexis. Or it may be that studying how law and policy folks search a discrete body of text to find specific items will provide a great testbed for improving search in general. My bet is that it is a combination of the above is at work, with the last reason being the strongest. This quote explains why.

we were struck by how readable and accessible these opinions are. Court opinions don’t just describe a decision but also present the reasons that support the decision. In doing so, they explain the intricacies of law in the context of real-life situations. And they often do it in language that is surprisingly straightforward, even for those of us outside the legal profession. In many cases, judges have gone quite a bit out of their way to make complex legal issues easy to follow.

I often tell students to beware of opinions because they fail to live up to the view Google has of opinions. That being said, some opinions match Google’s view. To me, Google called out the language, because Goolge is interested in how a set of information is constructed, can be mapped, and mined. Legal opinions have some set rules that probably make them highly useful to those interested in search and I think the area of computer science called machine learning.

I must, as always, note the privacy issues that arise whenever online searches for information in sensitive topics occurs. Individuals may need to be cautious and lawyers seeking to save money may, I stress may, need to think about confidentiality issues. I don’t think that letting someone know you read a case or searched for information about a legal topic, necessarily runs afoul of the rules. Still, as it becomes easier to connect dots, one might find a group of lawyers who think that such searches for clients pose problems.

Is Anything Ever Out of Print? Or Google and The Monkey’s Paw

Deven Desai — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:30:46 +0000

As the Google Book Deal approaches its next phase, I am wondering does anything ever go out of print? Pam Samuelson and others have noted the vague nature of the deal. I have poked at some drafting issues at the Public Index. The out of print problem seems like a key issue about why this deal should not proceed. (I am assuming that the out of print terms will not change much or at all). How books are treated from display to revenue is controlled heavily by the print status. Indeed, the deal is premised on the idea that so many out of print books will be available. Yet, if one reads this rather complicated entertainment industry-styled deal, one may find that out of print is a moving target. If I am correct, that is not a good thing.

Let’s look at the deal. Old Section 3.2 covers what display status is allowed for a book and requires a determination of whether a book is commercially available. Who determines that status? Google (3.2(d)(i)). Google will conduct:

an analysis of multiple third-party databases as well as an analysis of the Book’s retail availability based on information that is publicly available on the Internet. When analyzing the third-party databases, Google will use the publishing status, product availability and/or availability codes to determine whether or not the particular database being used considers that Book to be offered for sale new through one or more then-customary channels of trade in the United States

Of course as the market shifts and on-demand or digital publishing grows (and yes we ought to consider that those two models could easily be the norm for the near future) all books will be publicly available. If so, the determination seems to be useless. But, even a deferential reading that some books will be out of print has problems. Consider that the default is that if Google can’t find proper information as defined in the deal about a book (can anyone say orphan works analog with me?) the default is that the book is not commercially available. (“All Books for which Google does not have information from the sources identified above will be determined to be not Commercially Available.”)

Furthermore, the rightsholders can assert that a book is commercially available and then Google must honor that claim unless it ; “reasonably believes that the information is inaccurate.” That standard is an invitation to either fight or fight only when the stakes are right. They won’t be right unless a huge number of claims are asserted and Google wants to pick up the problem of an aggressive publisher industry. Again with on-demand and digital publishing the publishers could in good faith claim that a book is commercially available.

Let’s go further into the process where we shall see that some rather odd ideas about reversion and out of print are in control and a possible, but not certain, safety valve about how the determinations are made. The deal states “Google’s initial determination of whether or not a Book is Commercially Available will be used to initially classify Books as “In-Print” or “Out-Of-Print,” as such classifications are defined in the Author-Publisher Procedures, and only for purposes of the Settlement.”

So Google makes the determination, but there are limits. In fact, if one goes to the Author-Publisher Procedures, one finds a command (“shall” indicates no discretion to me):

A Book shall be classified as In-Print if it meets either of the following tests:
(i) Test 1: The author-publisher contract for the Book does not provide for reversion to the Author of rights in the Book under any circumstances, or the Book is “inprint” under the author-publisher contract. For this purpose, the Book may be “in-print” even if the contract does not use the term “in-print,” provided, however:
(1) If the contract measures “in-print” by reference to revenues and more than fifty percent (50%) of the revenues paid to a Publisher from exploitation of a Book are earned from the Revenue Models, then those revenues shall not be considered in determining whether this Test 1 has been met.
(2) If the contract measures “in-print” by units sold or measures other than revenues, then an equivalent principle will be applied in determining whether this Test 1 has been met. The fact that a Book or information about a Book is included in a database or that information about the Book is provided in search engine results does not, by itself, mean that the Book is “in-print.”
(3) A Book is not “in-print” if the author-publisher contract provides for reversion to the Author of rights in the Book and all of the criteria for reversion have been met (except that the Author need not have sent a request for reversion to the Publisher).
(ii) Test 2: To the extent consistent with any rights in the Book that it may have under the author-publisher contract, the Publisher publicly has announced to the trade that it has undertaken concrete steps to publish an existing or new edition of the Book, and such edition is published within twelve (12) months of the announcement.
(b) If neither of the Tests in Section 3.2(a)(i) or (ii) is met, then the Book shall be classified as Out-of-Print.

There is quite a bit to unpack here, but I will try to get to the crux of the tests. First, I am not sure why the contract’s language about reversion controls given that copyright law has a distinct reversion remedy that I am pretty certain trumps contracts. Second, a contract’s idea of what is in print says more about bargaining power than actual availability. Third, the reference to the Revenue Models seems like a decent nod to the problem of circularity. I think the deal is trying to be fair that insofar as the in print and out of print determination turns on money revenues or units sold and those numbers are coming mainly from the deal, the numbers will not be used to claim that the book is in print. I think this idea could prevent resurrecting the print status via the deal directly. If so, that may work.

Nonetheless, this process seems geared towards permitting a publisher to deem almost any work as being in print. We need better information about how contracts (which may or may not be standard) determine in print. In addition, this language: “To the extent consistent with any rights in the Book that it may have under the author-publisher contract, the Publisher publicly has announced to the trade that it has undertaken concrete steps to publish an existing or new edition of the Book, and such edition is published within twelve (12) months of the announcement.” indicates that publishers can resurrect books from out of print status quite easily and want that option.

In a digital world, the idea that we want the books resurrected is tempting. Whether that resurrection comes in a manner that we desire is the problem.

Image: WikiCommons, by Ateles geoffroyi; Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Academic Books, Non-Academic Books, BitTorrent, and Google’s Brand Power

Deven Desai — Mon, 12 Oct 2009 14:40:57 +0000

D is for Digital is over now. I urge anyone interested in the Google Book Deal (aka the Google Book Search) to check out the schedule page and the webcast links (the stream links are at the top of the Friday and Saturday schedules respectively). James Grimmelmann put together a conference that aired out pro and con views rather well. In fact, I’d say although many were questioning the deal, I learned a good amount about the views of those in favor of the deal. I was not convinced that the deal is good and should go forward, but I appreciated hearing more about how the deal evolved and defenders’ views.

I highly recommend the keynote lunch with Pam Samuelson and Paul Courant. That panel warmed up the group. Some really good questions about transparency of the process, responsibility, and more came up. Pam’s key point that if one builds a pubic good this big, public trust responsibilities go with it was dead on for me. I highly recommend watching the video for all that was said.

The next panel C is for Culture was excellent. James asked a question that has been on my mind and we had kicked around at WIP IP last week. Is Google Book Search irrelevant?

Here is why that is good question. First, the day so far emphasized that the majority of the books in question are academic books. As Pam explained and Paul Duguid echoed, if scholars’ books are at stake, scholars should be involved. Paul made clear that scholarly standards should guide the project.

Now, consider that many books are becoming available on BitTorrent. In addition, one panelist, Dan Reetz has a fascinating project. His DIYscanner project is a wild moment in grassroots digital activism. The story of how he chose to build his low-cost, open source DIY scanner (we’re talking maybe $300-$400 total) so that one could scan personal (and other books) at the rate of a few seconds per page and without destroying the book merits another post. (for now here is a link to the plans to build your own scanner) In addition, Reetz noted that majority of new books are leaked prepublication. As a general matter, a key claim is that users will pay for a book but copy the book so that they can search and take many books with them. The importance of these changes is that crowd-sourced and other approaches to digitizing text is on the move. One can see this shift as indicating market failure or that ereader functionality will be more and more the case.

As scanners, ereaders, and companies like Stanza offer better ways to access, search, mark, and read, the walled or controlled version of the text experience that the Google Book Deal offers seems odd. I doubt, however, that it will be irrelevant. Google’s brand, the ease of searching (even with its errors so far), and the ability to trust Google over BitTorrent or other sources will likely make it relevant to many. Nonetheless, the growth in alternative sources would suggest that Google will need to choose between a web search that captures all useful book offerings or a Google Book Search that only gives Google Book results. As the last panel on antitrust explored, Google is already dominant in search. It arguably killed a little company called MapQuest. Once Google offered its maps and its maps became the default listing when one entered address information into the search, MapQuest was done. That seems awfully close to the MS bundling issues of the last decade. When it comes to books, Google’s lead and dominance will give it massive power and leverage over how we all access knowledge. Nonetheless, it may be that grassroots, crowd-sourced movements will permit an end around for the control the publishers want through this deal. To be clear an end-around is insufficient protection against the lock-in problems the Google Book Deal poses, but it may help push Google to reach a deal that is less run by publisher interests.

Google = ICANN?

Deven Desai — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:51:15 +0000

One way to think about the Google Book Deal is that Google will end up as the super-gateway to books. It will in effect be the ICANN central authority of online books. So when Amazon and others have objected to Google’s claim that it will let everyone play in its sandbox, they are smart. No company should want to be a reseller (registrar in domain name terms). Insofar as one is competing with Google, who may also sell books, having to go through Google, the competitor, is undesirable to say the least. As the D is for Digital conference highlights, the way non-U.S. interests are not well-covered and represented is a problem. Insofar as the class action process is hijacking these international and domestic interests, the deal could be understood as an instance of arrogant law making with problems analogous to what one finds in Internet governance matters.

Danger Will Robinson: Google Book Deal Is at DEFCON 2

Deven Desai — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 21:59:42 +0000

The Google Book Deal is suspended. Time to cheer, correct? No. As Pam Samuelson noted in the New York Times, that probably is too little time to resolve the issues at hand. In fact I think right now is when the GBD is at quite a dangerous stage.

First neither party represents the public. One cannot expect them to represent the public, and one ought not trust they will do the right thing for the public. To be clear, I am not making a moral judgment here. I expect, as we all should, that each party will seek to maximize its position. Understanding why I refuse to call this situation a settlement helps understand this point. As many know, this action encompasses far more than the claims at issue in the suit. Many think that Google was on strong grounds for its fair use clam and its original use. The Publishers (aka the Registry seeming to be working for authors) saw the chance to get ahead of the digital curve. Unlike music and film, they realized they could look good and capture publishing’s future. They offered Google a deal that Google did not need. Or did it? Although Google is a data vacuum and does well with the ad-based business model, the search giant has been searching for a new revenue stream. Online ads can’t be the only source of revenue from any viewpoint. That is a precarious position. Indeed, the online ad market just took a big dip. The Deal presents Google with the chance to make money from something other than ads.

With this perspective one sees that expecting or trusting either party to look out for the public’s interest is foolish. My guess is that the public choice literature could yield some useful ways to think about the problem too, but I have not thought that through as yet.

Second, Google and the Publishers now have a wave of information from all quarters that they can use to their benefit. Here is the strategy that I expect to see. Assess the most severe and some of the less severe criticisms. Incorporate some of them in changes. Keep the deal as is for the most part (Note that is precisely what the Registry said will be the case “the core agreement is going to stay the same.”). Then when the time to approve, deny, or move the Deal to another form comes, one claims “We acted in good faith. We can’t keep everyone happy. Without this deal no one wins. Can’t we get along, move forward, and sort the details later? That is a more reasonable way to proceed.”

More importantly, those who have kept paying attention to the problem may start to lose focus or fade out. People may become tired or say is this thing still going on?

And that is why I say Danger Will Robinson. The Google Book Deal is at Defcon 2.

Tweeting for the Party

Danielle Citron — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 19:11:26 +0000

During the 2008 election, Democrats effectively used Web 2.0 platforms to garner interest in the campaign and win supporters. President Obama has been widely hailed as the first “Tech President,” and he seems to have trounced the Facebook landscape. To date, President Barack Obama has over 6.6 million Facebook friends, while Sarah Palin only has 848, 614 Facebook pals and Mitt Romney has 70, 130.

Although the President has proven his mettle on Facebook and MySpace (where he has over 1.8 million friends), Republicans rule the day on the micro-blogging front. The Congressional Research Service reports that congressional Republicans out-tweeted their Democratic counterparts during two one-week periods this summer. Nancy Scola attributes Congressional Republicans’ Twitter dominance to their desire to regain the public’s attention and favor now that they are in the minority. AMERICAblogs’ John Aravosis worries that Democrats have ceded their online advantage.

No matter the current political victor in this social media landscape, Government 2.0 is here to stay. It surely has great potential to shine light on government policymaking and to marshal public participation, especially from people who otherwise wouldn’t bother getting involved with government policymaking. Adding the President as a friend on MySpace and joining live chats may seem to be a relatively costless endeavor as compared to writing letters or commenting on agency rulemakings. But Government 2.0 also poses privacy risks: social media sites not only give government access to people’s policy insights but also access to all of individuals’ social media data, such as their videos, photos, walls musings, “Top 25 things you don’t know about me” lists, and the like. Soon, I will be posting on SSRN a draft of my essay “The One-Way Mirror: Enhancing Participation and Securing Privacy for Government 2.0″ (forthcoming George Washington Law Review) and hope to get your feedback.

Austin Police Department Wrestles with Anonymous Critics: Remembering New York Times v. Sullivan

Danielle Citron — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 16:46:42 +0000

Austin Police Chief Art Acevedo, like Howard Beale in Network, is “mad as hell and is not going to take it anymore.” Why? Anonymous online commentators have accused him and other officers of e ngaging in sexual impropriety and other quid pro quo behavior. According to the Austin American-Statesman, a poster masqueraded as a police commander in making some of the comments. The department suspects that some of the posters could be department employees. Acevedo asserted that because such posts erode public trust in the department and wrongly malign it, the department is considering seeking “search warrants or subpoenas from judges to learn the identities of the authors.” The Texas legislature recently criminalized impersonating another on social network sites without their permission and with the intent to harm, defraud, intimidate, or threaten.

The Police Chief’s discussion moves us into New York Times v. Sullivan territory: the right to criticize government and the conduct of public officials. Sullivan provides immunity for speech related to the business of governing for all but knowing or reckless falsehoods. It also teaches us that the freedom to criticize government is “the central meaning of the First Amendment.” Justice Brennan’s opinion explained that the idea of seditious libel is inconsistent with the First Amendment, echoing Alexander Meklejohn’s notion that the Constitution made the people their own governors. It underscored that because “erroneous statements” are “inevitable in free debate,” it must be protected if the freedom of expression is to have the “breathing space” it “needs to survive.”

Eroding the public’s trust in the police department, if deserved, is precisely what New York Times v. Sullivan would say citizen-critics of government must do to govern themselves. We can make meaningful choices about public officials only if whistle blowers and others reveal their “quid pro quo” behavior and other forms of sexual impropriety on the job. Yet, as the Sullivan Court held, deliberate falsehoods about public officials can be “used as a tool for political ends” and can interfere with the “orderly manner in which economic, social, or political change is to be effected.” Hence, for the Court, calculated falsehoods “are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.” Further complicating matters is the question of how much government can limit its employees’ speech, something that First Amendment scholar Helen Norton has tackled thoughtfully in this Duke Law Journal piece. Interestingly, civil libertarian groups applauded the hiring of Police Chief Art Acevedo in 2007. I wonder what the Austin ACLU thinks now.

H/T Slashdot for the story

Copyright Irony, Of Royalty Boards and Google Book Deals

Deven Desai — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 18:33:49 +0000

Earlier this week Live365 filed a law suit arguing that the Copyright Royalty Board is unconstitutional. Today is the deadline for authors to opt-out of the class in the Google Book Settlement. The idea that this Settlement ought to approved is more than suspect. Others have noted the myriad issues the settlement raises. As Pam Samuelson has put it “Exploiting an opportunity made possible by lawsuits brought by a small number of plaintiffs on one narrow issue, Google has negotiated a settlement agreement designed to give it a compulsory license to all books in copyright throughout the world forever. This settlement will transform the future of the book industry and of public access to the cultural heritage of mankind embodied in books. How audacious is that?” The nature of the class, whether class action (which I usually see as better suited to resolving tort rather than property claims) is the correct approach, the way in which this class purports to operate, and the anti-trust issues alone should make it clear that this deal, although possibly offering benefits, should be slowed down and put under further scrutiny.

It is ironic that one one hand Live365 has been able to raise a Constitutional challenge to a copyright royalty issue, and on the other hand what is surely a turning point in copyright history and the question of how society governs access-to-knowledge is subject to a private deal between private parties who have little concern for society’s claim to access and use the works in question. To be clear, I am not arguing that it is improper to figure out a possible payment system. Samuelson’s work on mapping the public domain is clear about reasons we may need and want to have certain groups build, maintain, and charge money for information repositories. The questions that concern me are what will that system look like? Will it allow innovation and competition in the provision of the similar services or will it hinder such efforts? Is this service a natural monopoly? Will the incumbents after the deal is done be able to extract rent? What about the different uses that are conflated here (e.g., higher educational uses, research uses, social networking uses, and more)? What about the spillovers that could come from a more open system such as empirical research on the data in the works and computer science work on the way language operates?

I have begun a close read of the 140 page contract and its appendices. I urge all of you to take a look at the contract. It reminds a little too much of entertainment deals I have read in practice. Some clauses are opaque; some bizarre. All protect one party and ignore others. In a Hollywood or other publishing arena that may be O.K. When talking about the modern Library of Alexandria, it is not.

To whet your appetite about why one should not accept the deal at face value look at this statement of objectives:

The economic terms for Institutional Subscriptions of Books will be governed by two objectives: (1) the realization of revenue at market rates for each Book and license on behalf of Rightsholders and (2) the realization of broad access to the Books by the public, including institutions of higher education. Plaintiffs and Google view these two objectives as compatible, and agree that these objectives will help assure both long-term revenue to the Rightsholders and accessibility of the Books to the public.

My initial comments are at the Public Index in Section IV. But in brief, the assumption that the objective of market rates and the realization of broad public access are compatible is on the surface semi-plausible but facile. The following sub-clauses make it clear that broad public access is not the animating force on the deal. Intense control over access and the ability to price discriminate (including a ban on k-12 access unless the Registry (publishers) agree) are the goals. Again if others read the sections and can show where I err, I am all ears.

As a general matter, if anyone can share why class action was wise and/or a good fit here, please share your insights.

Last, I suggest that this deal is so important that Congress has to be involved. As private re-writing of the Copyright Act is not the correct way to proceed. It will likely take away the chance for copyright to roar into the twenty-first century with a winning solution for authors, publishers, and society at large and instead will repeat history with the system being captured and benefiting only a narrow class of stakeholders.

Cyber Civil Rights vs Privacy in the “Skanks in NYC” case

Kaimipono D. Wenger — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 18:40:26 +0000

As Dan rightly notes, the recent court order unmasking the anonymous author of the “Skanks in NYC” blog raises serious privacy concerns. He elaborates on those concerns in his post, arguing that the court used too low of a standard, that the lawsuit may have been frivolous, and that anonymity needs greater protection. Dan links to CyberSLAPP, an EFF project which combats abusive lawsuits that seek to unmask anonymous critics of corporations or public figures.

CyberSLAPP’s site contains a spirited defense of a right of anonymous criticism which reads, in part:

Why is anonymous speech important?

There are a wide variety of reasons why people choose to speak anonymously. Many use anonymity to make criticisms that are difficult to state openly to their boss, for example, or the principal of their children’s school. The Internet has become a place where persons who might otherwise be stigmatized or embarrassed can gather and share information and support victims of violence, cancer patients, AIDS sufferers, child abuse and spousal abuse survivors, for example. They use newsgroups, Web sites, chat rooms, message boards, and other services to share sensitive and personal information anonymously without fear of embarassment or harm. Some police departments run phone services that allow anonymous reporting of crimes; it is only a matter of time before such services are available on the Internet. Anonymity also allows “whistleblowers” reporting on government or company abuses to bring important safety issues to light without fear of stigma or retaliation. And human rights workers and citizens of repressive regimes around the world who want to share information or just tell their stories frequently depend on staying anonymous sometimes for their very lives.

Is anonymous speech a right?

Yes. Anonymous speech is presumptively protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. Anonymous pamphleteering played an important role for the Founding Fathers, including James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, whose Federalist Papers were first published anonymously. And the Supreme Court has consistently backed up that tradition, ruling, for example, that an Ohio law requiring authors to put their names on campaign literature was a violation of the First Amendment. Indeed, the Supreme Court has ruled that protecting anonymous speech has the same purpose as the First Amendment itself: to “protect unpopular individuals from retaliation and their ideas from suppression.”

Of course, any sensible person would be opposed to silencing today’s James Madisons or Alexander Hamiltons. Is this really the correct analogy here, though? Is Skanks in NYC like the Federalist Papers?

Because, of course, the flip side of anonymity is that it can open the door to uniquely problematic personal attacks. This problem is set out in Danielle’s article Cyber Civil Rights, where she examines cases where anonymity was used as a shield to allow malicious online mobs to harass innocent victims, who tend to be disproportionately female. (And of course, the privacy sword cuts both ways here as well — it is a rather egregious invasion of privacy for a normal person to have their private life attacked on a blog.)

The Skanks in NYC blog has been taken down, but the news reports make clear that the site was not dedicated to political discourse, human rights advocacy, or whistleblowing about problematic corporate actions. Rather, it was a series of personal attacks on the model Liskula Cohen, calling her a whore, a ho, an old hag, the “skankiest in NYC” and a “psychotic, lying, whoring … skank.” Cohen — who coincidentally was recently the victim of a freak, career-ending real-life attack by a stranger — was targeted in personal, particularly gendered ways by the Skanks in NYC site. (After all, there is no male analogue to words like slut, skank, or whore.)

These attacks affected her personally, and had negative effects on her career as well, as reported in various news accounts.

Cohen, who described herself as a “serial monogamist” and has a “zero tolerance drug policy,” said the words were defamatory and harmful to her career. Prospective clients would question her about the blog and what she was doing in the photos, she says.

“Finding new clients this year has not been a walk in the park,” she said. “I’ve worked very long in this industry.”

Frankly, Skanks in NYC doesn’t look like a set of Publius-esque words that deserves protection for anonymity. It does not match any of CyberSLAPP’s examples of helpful anonymity. Instead, it looks exactly like the many cases of anonymous and gendered personal attacks, like Autoadmit and Kathy Sierra attacks, which Danielle rightly labels destructive: Online attacks, often sexually framed, which targeted the personal well-being and careers of their disproportionately female victims.

I understand that the concern here is for the precedent. Google turned over the anonymous blogger’s identity in this case; who’s to say that they won’t do it in the case of Publius or a corporate whistleblower? But in this case, the court order is based to a large degree on the problematic nature of the blog itself — that it simply called Cohen a whore and a skank, and so was focused primarily on the alleged defamation, rather than any other substantive comment.

So it seems to me that the court got it right. I agree with Dan on the general principle that anonymity can be very beneficial and should be protected in many cases; I certainly don’t want to encourage the unmasking of any Publii. But there are exceptions to that standard, such as in the case of personal attacks like Autoadmit or Kathy Sierra, or Skanks in NYC. In those cases, I tend to fall back on a different maxim: Sunlight is the best disinfectant.

Google, Glenn Beck, and AP: Are Results Being Squashed?

Deven Desai — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 21:57:04 +0000

So some of you may have heard that Glenn Beck has managed to upset advertisers by calling President Obama a racist. I don’t have much to say about Beck. I was more interested in the advertiser reaction. I saw the article on Yahoo! but wanted a more stable URL. So I copied the AP news story title and pasted into the Google. Here are the results.

Notice how the results indicate that there are “365 related articles”? Usually I click that and indeed see a rack of articles. Today, however, this is what happened when I clicked on the link promising a cornucopia of news stories:

Just one result! And it is only to AP page hosted by Google! (not sure whether Google is hosting all or most AP content, but it looks fishy). Maybe everyone was just running the AP story, but maybe those other outlets would have had more information of interest. Could it be that AP and Google are somehow in bed with each other on these results. (For all I know that is the case, and I missed that memo as I have been getting an article out the door and cleaning up a book chapter). Is this all part of AP’s claims regarding the ability to control its copy?

In short, watch the Google. It is creepy at times.

UPDATE: A quick commenter noted that the right side has a link that shows all the results “Sort by date with duplicates included.” THANKS!

I did not see that. Still I seem to recall that the related articles page used to have many of the redundant results. So the new approach could be helpful and efficient, but I wonder whether this new streamlined version of results applies to all news or just AP.

Furthermore, I throw open the idea that people may prefer the redundancies at the outset. That way they can go (as I did when I was on the web results page) to a source such as ABC or some other source one may trust or that one hoped would provide more than the AP coverage (be it vitriol over the boycott or praise for it).

Google Books and the Limits of Courts

Frank Pasquale — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 16:39:49 +0000

The Google Books litigation has inspired a lot of commentary on the web. As an early October fairness hearing approaches, a consensus appears to be building: the proposed settlement is too important and complex for a court to approve in its current form. Agent Lynn Chu has complained that “No one elected the[] ‘class representatives’ to represent America’s tens of thousands of authors and publishers to convey their digital rights to Google.” Pamela Samuelson, by all accounts one of the leading academics in American intellectual property law, has this to say:

The Google Book Search settlement will be, if approved, the most significant book industry development in the modern era [emphasis added]. . . . The Authors Guild has about 8000 members. OCLC has estimated that there are 22 million authors of books published in the U.S. since 1923 (the year before which books can be presumed to be in the public domain). Jan Constantine, a lawyer for the Authors Guild, is optimistic that authors and publishers of out-of-print books will sign up with the Registry, but there are many reasons to question this.

For one thing, the proposed settlement agreement implicitly estimates that only about 750,000 copyright owners will sign up with the Registry, at least in the near term. Second, many books are “orphans,” that is, books whose rights holders cannot be located by a reasonably diligent search. Third, many easily findable rights holders, particularly academic authors, would much rather make their works available on an open access basis than to sign up with the Registry. Fourth, signing up with the Registry will not be a simple matter, since the Registry won’t just take your word for it that you are the rights holder. You are going to have to prove your ownership claim.

The non-representativeness of the class is one ground on which it is possible to object to the proposed Book Search settlement. Other reasons to object or express concerns will be explored in subsequent articles. Objections must be filed with the court by September 4, 2009.

A suitable platform for hosting public discussions of the deal only launched a few weeks ago, thanks to the diligent efforts of James Grimmelmann (who is also organizing an academic conference on the issue in October). The proposed settlement raises a number of issues, which may only be addressed by extensive regulation of the project — or a public alternative dedicated to serving those marginalized by the current proposal.

The issues fall into at least four categories:

1) Antitrust: Randal Picker, Christopher Suarez, and James Grimmelmann have addressed the proposed settlement’s likely effects on competition in the field. On the surface, it appears that Google Books would be a good alternative to companies like Amazon and Elsevier, offering a new intermediary designed to drive down the cost of access to knowledge. However, academics have pointed out several specific terms of the proposed settlement that threaten to reduce competition in the field of digitized books in the long term.

2) Pricing: Here the basic worry is that Google Books could become like the big intermediaries criticized by the open access movement for excessive pricing of academic, scientific, and technical works. Universities have been burned in the past by nonchalantly accepting big publishers’ mergers and growing control over a corpus of academic journals. Though Google is supposed to bargain on behalf of book users to reduce prices charged by book owners, the record of private insurers in accomplishing the same “middleman” role is not heartening.

The proposed settlement envisions that Google will stand between consumers and producers of knowledge. It will play a role similar to that of private insurers in standing between providers and patients—determining what access people get, how much they have to pay, etc. The worrisome aspect of that arrangement is that providers and private insurers are both very concentrated in the US, and consumers (i.e., the businesses and individuals who buy insurance plans) are not. That’s a key reason why the US spends so much more on health care than other industrialized nations, without getting better results, access, or quality.

I’d expect to see the same dynamics play out in the context of books if this settlement goes through, because it promises to create parallel levels of concentration in the Registry (imagine all hospitals combined into one bargaining unit) and Google (similarly, imagine a merger of Cigna, United Health, and WellPoint). Bilateral monopolies aren’t pretty for those on the outside — think of ever-rising ticket prices for fans that result from the negotiations of the players’ union and baseball owners. That’s why I think a “public option” is as important in digitized books as it is in health care. And at the very least, ongoing antitrust supervision, like that provided for similar schemes in the past, should apply here.

3) Privacy: Here I can’t do better than EPIC, a leading group on these issues. Here are their concerns:

Civil liberties organizations are urging Internet users to tell Google to adopt privacy protections for the Google Book Search. A judge in New York will determine later this year whether to approve the proposed settlement that would establish the service and give Google access to detailed personal information without any privacy safeguards.

The chart at the bottom of that page shows how the settlement threatens the “right to read anonymously.”

4) Cultural Power: Authors are concerned about Google’s power over the distribution, visibility, and pricing of their work. The Registry’s proposed leadership is not sufficiently representative of the wide range of publishers and authors. Perhaps a) different types of books should be subject to different types of boards of leadership, and b) all decisions about distribution, visibility, and pricing be made in an open manner. As for 4a), I think academic author in particular should worry about their books being subject to the types of revenue strategies pursued by, say, romance novelists or self-help authors. We need a separate board to handle academic books, or at least university press books. As for 4b): Google will counter that it needs to be secretive here, as it is in so many other areas, because unsavory actors could game the system. But Google should at least concede that concerns about gaming are lower in the book space than in the search space, since search engine optimizers are unlikely to publish fake books to game the system. Also, there could be a relaxation of these terms of openness as long as there is some open alternative.

In conclusion: for me, the key problems law can address are

a) extraordinary pricing power by Google/Registry alliance,
b) lack of transparency about how terms will be set,
c) lack of a public alternative to serve the people that Google fails to serve, and
d) threats to privacy

How do we solve these problems? I would propose the following responses:

a) guarantee of some form of free or subsidized access for those making under 300% of federal poverty level wages,
b) either open all Registry proceedings or at least follow Danny Weitzner’s approach to “extreme factfinding” here,
c) condition the settlement on either i) Google’s giving a copy of the digitized corpus to the government in exchange for the cost of scanning and a reasonable rate of return and/or ii) the government requiring all works copyrighted after 2009 to be digitally deposited and part of a corpus that the government could operate and make available on its own terms, and
d) allow EPIC and others to negotiate with relevant FTC policymakers to build in privacy safeguards.

I know these terms are all likely to be controversial. A public option in particular should respect the autonomy and growth of private search in this field — the organization of knowledge is an exciting field for private sector innovation. But I hope one thing is clear: it would be unjust to allow the parties to settle the case without giving a wide range of stakeholders an opportunity to fully vent their concerns. And given the likely need to involve the FTC, DOJ, and Copyright Office in ongoing supervision of the settlement terms, it is time for some inter-branch cooperation and coordination on the issue.

Image Credit: *keng.

Could Yahoo! + Bing = Death to Google?

Deven Desai — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:31:16 +0000

Yahoo! continues to be in the news as company that has lost its way. After failed merger problems, Yahoo has now sold its search business to the formerly evil and now oddly white knight(ish) Microsoft. It seems that Yahoo! and MS are now in a deal where MS’s Bing will power (and have some brand palcement) Yahoo!’s search. Others can go into the drop from about $46 billion to $4 or 5 billion sale price and other Yahoo! acts that make one wonder what the company is doing. For now, I want to remind folks about a little relationship called Yahoo! search powered by, wait for it, Google. Yes, Google. I wonder whether the G would be where it is today if Yahoo! had not given it that key placement. As one article pointed out

In a unique twist, Yahoo didn’t simply renew the deal for Google to be its “backup” partner, used only when Yahoo itself doesn’t have an answer. Instead, the company has embraced Google’s results even more tightly. Unveiled to the general public today is a new Yahoo search results page, where there is no longer a separation between Yahoo’s own human-powered listings and Google’s crawler-based results. Instead, the two are blended together.

Read the whole article for some fascinating perspectives on Yahoo! versus Google when Y was the big player. To be fair, Yahoo! appears to have had small chances to buy Google (but one might also say that after being apparently turned down for help by Yahoo!, the Google folks knew that they should not sell even at $3 billion). I for one don’t think I can say that Yahoo! should have known that Google was going to pop its IPO the way it did. For that matter had then CEO Terry Semmel bought Google, he would have had to take it public to show that it was worth the money. As Wired notes “Google’s revenue stood at a measly $240 million a year. Yahoo’s was about $837 million. And yet, with Yahoo’s stock price still hovering at a bubble-busted $7 a share, a $5 billion purchase price would essentially mean that Yahoo would have to spend its entire market value to swing the deal. It would be a merger of equals, not a purchase.”

So now we have the Yahoo! MS deal. It could be that Yahoo! is again running up the white flag about its ability to be a real technology/engineering company (“But now we have empirical evidence: At Yahoo, the marketers rule, and at Google the engineers rule. And for that, Yahoo is finally paying the price.”). But it may also be a way that MS will be able to grab Yahoo!’s customers, compete on search, and show that it still has the chops to beat back Google’s relentless drive to be all things to everyone. If so, maybe the two companies will balance each other out for a bit. Either way, it seems that as the NY Times pointed out, Yahoo! has exited the search game because as its CEO admits it cannot play in it at the level that MS and Google can (billions of dollars). Whether Yahoo! can find a new way to be relevant is another issue. The Times article describes Yahoo!’s severe dysfunction and what to me reads like classic Internet company arrogance. That being said, maybe Yahoo! is picking its best fight and with a little MS mixed in, Google will have to stay honest too. Or maybe this move is Yahoo!’s way of taking on Google while Yahoo! heads out of our world.

The Convergence of the Public and Private in Online Spaces

Danielle Citron — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 14:02:05 +0000

Last month, Government Technology had an article entitled “Blurring the Line,” which discussed the increasingly public nature of online social networking sites. Employers now “friend” employees, leaving the employed likely to accept those friendships out of fear for losing their jobs. The article discusses the problems attendant to the convergence of of our work, social, and family worlds and asks whether this phenomenon will alter the nature of those spaces from a sharing free-for-all to a more buttoned-down, “not afraid for the boss to see” experience.

In reading the article, I wondered if the story will play out in a different way, one that will meet employers’ desire to harness the connectivity of social networking sites without compromising its current incarnation. As we have seen in the government sector with internal wikis like Intellipedia, we may see employers increasingly adopt in-house social networking sites, say a [Name] Company Connect.org, just as we have seen employers wade into the Twitter space. We may already be doing this (and it would be really interesting to learn about it), but perhaps such sites would nip in the bud employers/managers/supervisors’ desire to friend their underlings. This may detract from the goal of monitoring employees, but we surely have enough of that in the workplace already (as well as the ability to view employees’ profiles for the very many people who fail to set rigorous privacy settings, as ACM studies show). And it may save employers from having looked at employees’ damning wall musings and pictures and figuring out just what to do about it.

Surveillance Facebook-Style: It’s Your Party and You Can Cry If You Want To

Danielle Citron — Sun, 19 Jul 2009 11:01:18 +0000

The U.K.’s Register reports that British police stormed a man’s birthday barbeque party because his invite to 15 Facebook friends advertised an “all night party.” Before the party could really begin, police showed up in four cars, a riot van, and a helicopter, ordering the birthday boy to shut the party down or face arrest. With an appropriate amount of humor, Andrew Poole, the birthday trouble-maker, explained: “What the police did was come in and stop 15 people eating hamburgers.” What would possess the Facebook Precinct to bother here? Section 63 of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 grants police powers to remove individuals attending or preparing for a “rave,” defined as playing amplified music “wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats.”

This incident demonstrates the perils of a society that monitors and mines Facebook communications. The costs to liberty include blows to free expression and association. Brits will surely think twice about wall messages and “what I am doing now” missives that include talk of parties and other activities subject to misinterpretation. The costs to society: the misdirection of police from real threats to society and wasted resources spent breaking up a birthday bash (the helicopter time apparently cost 200 pounds and tack on the police efforts, including any investigation they conducted and time at the party, and gas for the four cars and van). So with Facebook surveillance the British may get less liberty and less security.

Commentators on the Register story noted their relief at living in the United States. They suggested that law enforcement and security officials would never be so foolish as to monitor Facebook traffic. Think again. The NSA’s Advanced Research Development Activity (ARDA) has funded research on the “Semantic Analytics on Social Networks: Experiences in Addressing the Problem of Conflict of Interest Detection,” which discusses how intelligence about people can be extracted from social networks. ARDA’s role is to spend NSA money on research that can “solve some of the most critical problems facing the U.S. intelligence community.” ARDA’s function is to make sense of the massive amount of data that the NSA collects.

Should Americans be worried about intelligence profiling a la Facebook? Many might think that the use of privacy settings on social networking sites would obviate the problem. First, studies suggest that most social networking site users use the default privacy settings, which are often the least privacy protecting and may reveal much of a user’s musings. Second, this assumption presumes that third party sites will not turn over social networking data, which they own, to the government, either for a pretty price or in the face of a subpoena or warrant. This assumption may be faulty. So what is all of the fuss? Automated intelligence profiling has obvious costs, such as the ones posed by the birthday party bust. It also has less apparent ones, such as mining misleading social networking data with other not-so reliable private and public database date and, poof, people end up on government watchlists.

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