Google Europe Blog

French Supreme Court rules for Google in trademark cases

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The French Supreme Court this afternoon ruled in Google’s favour in a series of groundbreaking trademark cases.
Back in March, Europe’s highest court ruled that Google had not infringed trade mark law by allowing advertisers to bid for keywords corresponding to third party trade marks. The ruling applies to three cases, one with Louis Vuitton, another brought by bride service CNRRH and another by travel agency Viaticum. As is standard practice, the ECJ referred the cases back to France for their final judgment.
Today, the French Supreme Court was unequivocal in their rulings and anyone who reads them will be left in no doubt that there was no trade mark infringement in these cases. In addition, the Court went beyond the European Court of Justice by excluding any act of unfair competition or misleading advertising by Google. The Court also ruled in Google’s favour in a related fourth case brought by a French company called Gifam.
All cases that are judged by the Supreme Court are automatically referred to a French Court of Appeal. But the appeal court needs to apply today’s judgement.
Our guiding principle has always been that advertising should benefit users, and our aim is to ensure that ads are relevant and useful. We believe that user interest is best served by maximizing the choice of keywords, ensuring relevant and informative advertising for a wide variety of different contexts. So, we believe this is a good day for users who will continue to benefit from greater rather than restricted choice.
Posted by: Benjamin Du Chaffaut, Google Legal Counsel, France

Street View driving update

Friday, July 9, 2010

In May we announced that we had mistakenly included code in our software in Street View cars that collected WiFi payload data. As soon as we discovered our error, we not only stopped collecting WiFi data entirely, but also grounded our fleet of cars globally to give us time to remove the WiFi scanning equipment and discuss what had happened with local regulators.

The WiFi data collection equipment has been removed from our cars in each country and the independent security experts Stroz Friedberg have approved a protocol to ensure any WiFi-related software is also removed from the cars before they start driving again.*

Having spoken to the relevant regulators, we have decided to start Street View driving in Ireland, Norway, South Africa and Sweden again starting next week. We expect to add more countries in time. Our cars will no longer collect any WiFi information at all, but will continue to collect photos and 3D imagery as they did before:

Photos: so that we can build Street View, our 360 degree street level maps. Photos like these are also being taken by TeleAtlas and NavTeq for Bing maps. In addition, we use this imagery to improve the quality of our maps, for example by using shop, street and traffic signs to refine our local business listings and travel directions; and

3-D building imagery: we collect 3D geometry data with low power lasers (similar to those used in retail scanners) which help us improve our maps. NavTeq also collects this information in partnership with Bing. As does TeleAtlas.

We recognize that serious mistakes were made in the collection of WiFi payload data, and we have worked to quickly rectify them. However we also believe that Street View is a great product for users, whether people want to find a hotel, check out a potential new home or find a restaurant. If you want more information about driving schedules, please look here www.maps.google.com/streetview.

Posted by Brian McClendon, VP of Engineering, Google Geo

*We've updated this paragraph to clarify that both the hardware and software will have been removed from all Street View vehicles before they resume driving.

Growing our appetite for geeky girl dinners

Wednesday, July 7, 2010

We’re always looking for opportunities to partner up with organizations that promote diversity and encourage women to excel in technology. Girl Geek Dinners is a world-wide initiative that does exactly that—it helps build communities of women who have a passion and interest in science, technology and other traditionally male-dominated fields by hosting social events around the world.

We recently sponsored the Amsterdam Girl Geek Dinner and I attended the event with my colleague Noha, who, like me, is a software engineer for Google in Zurich. At the dinner, we had the opportunity to meet and mingle with other women in the tech community and talk about what it’s like being a woman in the field of computer science. The keynote speaker at the event was renowned mathematician Ionica Smeets and I can’t imagine a woman more inspiring.

Google shares a similar goal to Girl Geeks—we want to make it possible for everyone to pursue careers in technology, regardless of gender. And, in our presentation at the event, we outlined our numerous initiatives to promote and support diversity in technology. We have various scholarship programs to help students to pursue their interests, excel in their studies and become leaders. And to encourage more female computer scientists to attend and participate in research conferences around the world, we also offer travel and conference grants in the Europe, Middle East and Africa regions. You can learn more about our diversity programs, here.

Posted by Alexandra Alecu, Software Engineer

Celebrating Freedom Of Expression in Poland

Friday, July 2, 2010

When I last visited Gdansk two decades ago, the independent Solidarity movement had just won a resounding victory in the communist world’s first free elections. Since then, I have seen Poland transformed into a prosperous democracy and I recently returned to speak at the All About Freedom festival addressing the meaning of freedom of expression in the Internet age.

It is tempting to compare Solidarity with the evolution of the Internet. Just like Solidarity, the Internet has proven a powerful grass-roots force for freedom of expression. At a newly created Solidarity Museum, a room is devoted to the underground press that flourished under one party communist restrictions. Any future Internet museum will surely contain rooms about the power of bloggers uploading their own opinions around the world and videos taken by mobile phone and posted on YouTube in places like Iran.

For much of the 1980s, the totalitarian regime in Poland attempted to crush Solidarity, declaring martial law and imprisoning its founder Lech Walesa and other Solidarity leaders. Today, it’s clear that certain governments are attempting to control their citizens by monitoring or censoring information on the Internet. We’re also seeing a general increase in the number of requests from democratic governments - for information about Internet users or for removal of information from Google’s index of the web. Some of these requests are legitimate and based in the rule of law and we honor them. In the interests of transparency, however, we recently launched an online Government Requests tool to show where these requests originate.

Poland certainly values free expression. My colleague, Susan Pointer, is in Krakow this weekend, speaking in the ‘New Technologies for Democracy’ session at the High-Level Democracy Conference. She will be focusing on the important role that technology - and internet technology in particular - can play in facilitating communication, participation, transparency and accountability in decision-making across the world.

In the end, Solidarity emerged victorious from its long struggle by sticking to its values of non-violence, free speech and multi-party democracy. Where governments try to crack down on the free exchange of ideas on the web, I believe the web’s innate openness will end up triumphing.

Posted by William Echikson, Head of Communications South, East Europe, Middle East and Africa

The UK’s public data tsunami gathers speed

Thursday, June 17, 2010

When the British Government said at the beginning of May that they would be releasing a ‘tsunami of public data’ you had to wonder whether reality would match up to the rhetoric. Oh ye of little faith... A fortnight ago, the Government released hundreds of new datasets - including a full list of Government expenditure - and this week, Transport for London announced that they too would be releasing lots of their transport data for free to the public.

The policy itself is not new. It was kicked off in the UK back in 2009 by Sir Tim Berners Lee and has resulted in the establishment of the data.gov site as the primary place for public data to be accessed. But the new Government has sent some strong signals from the top that it is an even greater priority for them to get government departments and agencies to shift from being information hoarders to information sharers.

This new mood makes it a really exciting time for the data geeks amongst us in the UK. It’s clear that the new British Government is getting as excited about data as the developer community itself, and that it is determined to be a European - and perhaps even global - leader in transparency. Countries around the world are waking up to the huge potential for re-use of data financed by the taxpayer. There are good social and democratic arguments behind this policy - but it also makes economic sense. If Governments want to stimulate the national growth of their local Internet economy, making data public for developers to reuse is a great way to build skills and position the country for data based business models of the future.

But, as we all know, the usability of the data is just as important as the data itself. To the ordinary citizen, a gargantuan list of numbers means nothing. Data only becomes useful when it is rendered accessible to the citizen: the task traditionally of statisticians and, increasingly, creative web developers who ‘mash’ different data sets, drop them into data crunching tools and turn them into citizen friendly applications. From Tube schedules to postcode databases, information works best when it can be overlaid with other datasets and correlations can be made, as services such as those created by the Government’s new Transparency Advisor, Tom Steinberg.

Some departments and agencies have been better than others at releasing data in truly useful ways. A machine readable format rather than in a PDF is preferable - so that developers spend as little time as possible manually reformatting and more time innovating. And there should be as few ‘strings’ attached as possible so developers can easily reuse it, mash it up, and create new tools and services. These details matter - and the next step for the UK officials behind the public data agenda is to ensure that all data released has consistently high standards of usability.

We hope this is the start of something big and that, rather than a one-off tidal wave, this becomes an ever flowing river of information that is released.

Posted by Sarah Hunter, UK Policy Manager.

Unlocking our shared cultural heritage: Google partners with the Austrian National Library

Tuesday, June 15, 2010

Gregor Mendel, the nineteenth century Austro-Hungarian scientist, is an ancestor of modern genetic studies. His paper, Experiments on Plant Hybrids, helped early twentieth century scientists make new discoveries about genetics and hybridity. Several of Mendel’s works now reside in the original in the Austrian National Library, alongside other important works of European and human culture, science and history. Among the other treasures contained in the library are Martin Luther’s first complete translation of the Christian bible, and several of the works of the Renaissance-era doctor and philosopher, Paracelsus.

Today we’re announcing an agreement with the Austrian National Library to digitize works from the library, bringing its rare and unique collection to a global audience through Google Books. The library was founded in the fourteenth century, and it was intended to become the universal human library, containing books in German, Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, among other languages. It contains the first ever printed book in Slovene, the oldest known prints in Bulgarian and an extensive collection of Czech and Hungarian works.

Through this agreement, the library will select up to 400,000 public domain books from its collections. Google will then digitize these works, making them available to anyone in the world with access to the web. This is a great step in our aim to help make the world’s books accessible to anyone with a connection to the Internet. We’re not alone in this aim. Around Europe and the rest of the world, an increasing number of organizations are running ambitious and promising book digitization projects, including the European Union’s own Europeana. We're very supportive of these efforts, because we want to see these books have the broadest reach possible. The books we scan are available for inclusion in Europeana and in other digital libraries.

Through a proliferation of projects such as these, and through more partnerships between private and public bodies, important works like those owned by the Austrian National Library can have tremendous reach. Earlier this year we announced a partnership with the Italian Ministry of Culture to digitize books. Today’s announcement is the next step towards the goal of preserving and disseminating Europe’s cultural heritage.

The Austrian National Library is our tenth library partner in Europe, and we look forward to working with more libraries and other partners. By working with these important institutions, we can help to unlock and democratize access to the world's cultural heritage.

Posted by Annabella Weisl, Strategic Partner Manager, Google Books

Brussels debates Open Internet on 10 June

Friday, June 4, 2010

Brussels will debate the European Union’s new digital agenda when the Open Forum Europe (OFE) holds its annual summit next Thursday, 10 June, in Brussels. After a keynote speech from Commissioner Neelie Kroes, Google’s Senior Vice President of Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond will speak. He will outline his take on the next wave of innovations on the Internet - and what policies are required to ensure the Internet creates the maximum social and economic benefits.

OFE, supported by a number of tech companies including Google, advocates an open, competitive European IT market. The summit’s packed agenda promises interesting debates on a range of subjects such as new innovation models, e-government and digital citizenship. If you have yet to sign up for the summit, do so asap at info@openforumeurope.org.

OFE was launched in 2002 to promote open source software. Like many Internet companies, Google benefits from open source - we use tens of millions of lines of open source code to run our products. We also give back: we are the largest open source contributor in the world, contributing over 800 projects that total over 20 million lines of code to open source.

The day before its summit, the OFE will return to its roots and host a Round Table on “Open Source Innovation in Business Models: Company and Community Integration.” Google open source guru Chris DiBona, who is responsible for our open source programmes will talk about the open source model, joined by George Greve, past President of Free Software Foundation Europe and now CEO at Kolab Systems. Maha Shaikh, senior researcher at the London School of Economics, will moderate.

The Round Table will take place on Wednesday 9 June between 8:00-10:00 AM at our Brussels premises at Chaussée d'Etterbeek 180, 1040 Brussels. Yes, that’s early, so we’ll provide a light breakfast. Some seats remain so if interested in attending, please sign up here.

Posted by Sebastian Müller, European Policy Manager

Europe Blog

French Supreme Court rules for Google in trademark cases

Street View driving update

Growing our appetite for geeky girl dinners

Celebrating Freedom Of Expression in Poland

The UK’s public data tsunami gathers speed

Unlocking our shared cultural heritage: Google partners with the Austrian National Library

Brussels debates Open Internet on 10 June

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