Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Bringing the world's lost books back to life
Monday, September 7, 2009
Today I am attending the European Commission's information hearing in Brussels on Google Books's agreement with American authors and publishers. This offers us a wonderful opportunity to clear up misunderstandings and further explain the opportunities offered by the US Agreement. All of us, on both sides of the Atlantic share the same crucial goal - to bring millions of lost books back to life.
If an American court approves, readers in the U.S. will be able for the first time to search, preview and buy online access to a great number of out-of-print books that were scanned as part of Google Book Search. A new non-profit registry will be set up to locate these in copyright but difficult to find books' rights holders and collect and distribute revenues to authors and publishers.
This hearing shows that European libraries, authors, publishers and users are grappling with the same issue of how to open up access to the world of knowledge contained in books. In recent weeks, we noted several important measures of support. We are already working successfully with libraries around the world, including in France, Belgium, the UK, Switzerland, Germany and Spain, insuring that our digital library includes works over 100 languages. I was particularly pleased to hear our Ghent Library Partner Sylvia van Peteghem talking about how together we have worked to allow viewers from all over the world access to her institution's priceless public domain collection. Last week, Mario Resca, General Director of the Italian Ministry of Culture, expressed a desire to partner with us to find ways on best valuing the Italian public domain books collection. Support from the Italian authorities represents an important step forward to demonstrating how our Books project can further benefit Europe.
While anybody is allowed to digitise and distribute out of copyright, so called public domain works, pose no legal problem free of charge or for a fee, what's really at stake are the fate of the vast majority of books -- by some estimate up to 80 percent of the total - which are in copyright out of print and hard to locate. These works are not sold through bookstores or held on most library shelves, and yet represent an important repository of the world's knowledge and culture. Often it is difficult to identify or locate the copyright holder. If the author has died, who holds his rights, his wife, children or another relative?
The agreement announced in October 2008 between Google and a broad class of copyright holders in the United States will dramatically expand access to out-of-print books, creating new revenue opportunities for authors and publishers. The new registry should help reduce the number of in-copyright works whose owners cannot be identified or found because authors will have a concrete economic incentive to come forward, claim their works and then earn money. For books that are in-print, the agreement would offer new distribution opportunities to copyright holders in the United States.
European authors and publishers whose books have been scanned from an American library may benefit from the new revenue that will come as American readers discover and purchase their books. They can register with the new registry to control and profit from online access to their books, or, just like American authors, they can choose to opt out. The registry will also benefit rightsholders by helping potential licensors for Europe reach out to rightsholders and negotiate agreements to license works in the EU. But no readers outside of the United States will reap the benefits American readers will see-- because the agreement is under U.S. law, it can by nature only govern what happens within the U.S.
In this context, we are delighted to see that the EU Commissioner for Information Society and Media Viviane Reding recently added her voice to the debate welcoming calling for Europe to act. "Google Books is a commercial project developed by an important player," she said. "It is good to see that new business models are evolving which could allow bringing more content to an increasing number of consumers." We agree. The bottom line conclusion from today's hearing is clear and straightforward: Europeans, not just Americans, should be empowered to rediscover long lost books
.
Posted by Daniel Clancy, Engineering Director
Europe unveils ambitious digital agenda
Thursday, September 3, 2009
European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso today unveiled his
platform
to win a new five year term in office. He promised that the Commission will work for a successful exit from the financial crisis, tackle climate change and advance a "people's Europe".
For us at Google, the most important signal was the scale of his declared ambition to spur a digital revolution. The President's paper repeated the word "transform" nine times and "radical" four times - a "
Europe committed to the radical transformation towards a knowledge-based society"
is, for Google, an essential starting point to address huge societal challenges we face.
The paper emphasises the need to invest in the new skills for the jobs of tomorrow, and sets an ambitious program to bring fast speed Internet across the European Union. Importantly, Barroso aims to bridge the divide between Europe's digital haves and have nots. Naturally, we are particularly excited that the
"Commission will develop a European Digital Agenda (accompanied by a targeted legislative programme) to tackle the main obstacles to a genuine digital single market,
" echoing recent calls made by the European Digital Media Association
EDiMA
(Google is a member).
But we would have liked to see more analysis of the new dynamics of innovation. Presiden Barroso's platform avoids mentioning the academic insights to be found in works such
Wikinomics
or
We Think
. Social networking media (such as Facebook and Twitter) are transforming the way people communicate and organise. These collaborative sites are powerful engines both driving forward economic growth and for addressing the big societal challenges the Commission wants to address. As we move forward, Google will discussing these opportunities with policy makers.
Posted By Simon Hampton, Director of European Public Affairs
Google Translate now supports all 23 official EU languages
Monday, August 31, 2009
(Cross-posted from the
The Official Google Blog
)
We spend a lot of time thinking about how information travels around the globe. After all, there are Googlers living and working in
dozens of countries
— and we're pretty sure our products are used in many more. So we're familiar with the need to translate information across borders, and we've been working hard to build the technology to enable you to do just that. Today, we're excited to announce that we've added nine new languages to
Google Translate
:
Afrikaans
,
Belarusian
,
Icelandic
,
Irish
,
Macedonian
,
Malay
,
Swahili
,
Welsh
and
Yiddish
. That means that Google Translate now supports 51 languages and 2550 language pairs — including all
23 official EU languages
.
The translation quality of these newest languages is still a little rough, but it will improve over time — and we're continuously working to improve quality for all languages supported by Google Translate. We're also working to integrate Google Translate into some of our other products; you can already translate
emails
within Gmail,
webpages
using Google Toolbar,
RSS feeds
in Google Reader and most recently,
documents
within Google Docs. For more information about Google Translate and these latest additions, check out our post on the
Research Blog
.
Posted by Jeff Chin, Product Manager
Making the dream of digital libraries come true
Friday, August 28, 2009
The European Commission today set out more
detail
on the future of its digital library project
Europeana
and the Commissioner has stated how she welcomes the
evolution of new business models
. It's exciting as the project aims to bring even more books, paintings and pictures online.
Sure, some people have suggested this means there's some sort of competition between Europeana and our own projects on books. I guess it makes a nice headline, but it's just not true. The fact is that bringing our cultural heritage online is a tremendous undertaking that can only be achieved by both private and public effort. Both services are complimentary. Indeed, Google is working hard to expand its cooperation with European libraries which form Europeana's backbone.
Google has already forged partnerships to scan public domain works with 30 libraries all around the world, including the Oxford University, the Bavarian State Library, the University of Lausanne and the University of Ghent. Google Books contains works in more than 100 languages. Just this week, the Italian Ministry of Culture announced that it would like to work with us to accelerate scanning of Italian-language works.
I recently visited one of our library partners, the Ghent library. I was amazed by the progress there. In just two years, almost 100,000 of the university's of public domain books have been scanned, making them available to anyone anywhere in the world. An Australian or African studying 17th-century Flemish art history now has access to a treasure trove of Dutch-language books, without needing to travel all the way to Belgium or to attend the University of Ghent. This revolutionary spread of knowledge represents the inspiration of projects such as Europeana and Google Books.
Of course, a key challenge for such projects is how to revive access to books that are in copyright, but are out of print. Until now, it is very difficult for projects like Europeana or Google Books to enable readers to access these books, even though they represent the bulk of library collections. In Ghent, for example, we only scan work published before the mid 19th-century.
By contrast, Google last year reached a groundbreaking agreement with an international class of authors and publishers that aims to bring back to life millions of these out of print in copyright books. If an American court approves, readers in the U.S. will be able for the first time to search, preview and buy online access to a great number of out-of-print books scanned as part of Google Book Search. A new non-profit registry will be set up to locate the rights holders of these in copyright but difficult to find books and collect and distribute revenues to authors and publishers.
The Commission is holding an information hearing on this agreement in Brussels on September 7. We welcome this as an opportunity to talk about the agreement and on how to develop solutions contributing to spread knowledge and culture through projects like Google Books and Europeana. Here, too, the European Commission Communication released today is helpful, as it launches a public consultation about how to allow for the developments of services similar to the one proposed under the US Google Book agreement. Google is interested in pursuing all avenues of strengthening and expanding our partnership with this ambitious digitization effort.
Posted by Antoine Aubert, European Copyright Policy Manager
About Google News In Italy
Thursday, August 27, 2009
You may have read in the press that the Italian Competition Authority
today notified us of the opening of an investigation in relation to Google News in response to a claim by the Italian Editors Association (FIEG). We're still reviewing this claim, but in the meantime, we thought it might be helpful to clarify how publishers can control their content on the web.
First, Google News has always been about highlighting diverse perspectives from multiple sources and then driving new readers directly to publishers' sites. We don’t display the news stories in their entirety. Rather, our approach is akin to that of web search: we simply show the headlines, a line or two of text and a link to the site – just enough information to make the user want to read the full story. Once a user clicks through to the article, it’s up to the news publisher to decide how to profit from this free traffic. They can choose to charge people to read the story in addition to placing advertisements on their site.
We're constantly in dialogue with news publishers and users about how we can improve Google News. As we explained to the FIEG when we met them earlier this year, Google News has over 25,000 sources from around the world. All of these news providers--like any website publisher--are in complete control when it comes to whether they want to be found on Google services. So if a news publisher doesn’t want to be found on Google.com, Google.it or any other reputable search engines, it can prevent indexation automatically via a universally accepted Internet standard called robots.txt. Publishers also have a range of other ways of controlling how their content appears (or doesn't). One such option is for a publisher to continue to appear in Google web search, but not in Google News. In that case, all they need to do is
contact us
to be removed. In fact, we met with several Italian publishers and representatives of FIEG just this summer to explain these options.
We respect the wishes of content owners, which is why we've made it easy to opt out of our services. However, when it comes to Google News, we have far more requests for inclusion than for removal. That's because publishers understand that the traffic generated by Google News, and services like it, provide valuable traffic: Google News sends over 1 billion clicks per month to news publishers.
We'll continue to work with all web sites and news publishers to help more people discover their content -- and for those that don't want to appear in Google or Google News, we'll continue to honor those requests as we always have.
Posted by Josh Cohen, Senior Business Product Manager, Google News
Powering a Safe Internet
Tuesday, August 25, 2009
The Dutch Minister of Justice Mr. Dr. E.M.H. Hirsch Ballin, pictured here on the left, recently launched the
Safe Internet
campaign.
The Dutch are world leaders in Internet surfing. Unfortunately, a minority of malicious people take advantage of this freedom to spam and spread malware. The Ministry of Justice's plan promotes some easy rules of thumb to alert people, stimulate safe use of the Internet and protect people's data. It highlights the following rules of thumb:
Update software and turn on your firewall.
Always check the web address before your engage in any payment transaction.
Handle your personal data with care.
Never open electronic files instantly.
Be alert to contacts who send in proposals or ask for data.
Google and YouTube support this public campaign and have signed up as partners. We share the goal of making the Internet safe, fighting malware and working to maintain online security. For more information and recent blogposts on all the different actions that Google has taken, check out the
Google Online Security Blog
. Also
YouTube Safety Center
allows users to to flag concerns they have regarding uploaded video's and comments, relating to spam and phishing, harmful, dangerous and hateful content.
See for more information the
video
of the launch of the public campaign or visit the
YouTube channel
of the Ministry of Justice.
Posted by Machiel Bolhuis, Policy Manager - the Netherlands
Is the New Statesman fair?
Thursday, August 20, 2009
We woke up this morning to see the cover of
New Statesman
, a UK political magazine, carrying a lurid illustration of the devil accompanied by the question "Is Google Evil?"
Our popularity around the world means we're used to articles that scrutinise Google's role on the web. That's fair. But did the New Statesman have any evidence of evil? Far from it.
In print, The New Statesman published a response from us alongside the article. We thought we'd publish it here:
Google's aim is and always has been to help people find the
information they're looking for. It's why our services have
become so popular. They are easy to use and they work.
Take Search. People use Google Search because they trust it to help them
find what they need. We don't charge for it or force people to use it. We
don't 'lock' our users in as some technology companies do.
Search is a highly competitive field which is evolving all the
time. In just the last few months we've seen the emergence of new services like Bing, Cuil and
Wolfram Alpha. People can choose to switch to these search
engines and others with a click of a mouse. More than half of
internet users in the UK say they use more than one search engine
every week.
Similarly, there is nothing to lock advertisers into using Google's
services. Advertising rates are not set by Google, but by a
competitive auction. Advertisers determine their own bids and budgets
and can adjust them at any time. And just as users can easily switch
between search engines, advertisers can and do spend their budgets in
a variety of places. The vast majority of Google's top advertisers advertise
on other search engines and in a range of other media, both offline and online.
They'll stick with Google only if the results they achieve are worth more than they spend.
Of course, not everyone sees it like that. Some are concerned that Google
is becoming too big and worry we might misuse the data we hold.
Online privacy is an important issue and one we take very seriously. As increasing
amounts of data are uploaded to the internet every day, it becomes
ever more important for people to understand the benefits and risks involved
. Google is committed to protecting people's
privacy online by offering transparency and choice.
We're transparent about the data we collect when people sign up for our
services and we design products that give people control over the information they share.
That data helps us provide a better experience for our users, helps combat
spam and fraud, and allows us to customise content to make it more relevant
and useful.
It also allows us to use anonymised, aggregated data to give valuable insights into what people are searching for.
One such tool is Google Flu Trends. Traditional flu surveillance systems take up to a fortnight to collect and release data. By comparison, search queries can be automatically counted very quickly, and because people are likely to search for symptoms or remedies before they contact a doctor, our estimates may be able to provide a useful early-warning system for outbreaks of flu.
It is not in our interest to abuse our position or misuse your data. People continue to use Google because they trust it to work. Our focus is on providing an ever better service because that's the only thing that keeps them coming back.
Posted by Peter Barron,
Director of Communications and Public Affairs
North and Central Europe
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