Europe Blog
Our views on the Internet and society
Explore historic sites with Google World Wonders
Thursday, May 31, 2012
A month ago, we announced a major expansion of our Google
Art Project
, which featured art from museums around the world. Today, we're taking another significant step forward in our goal to increase access to culture with the Google
World Wonders
Project.
The World Wonders Project goes outdoors to bring online icons from all times and places, and from all over civilizations all over the world. It features 132 historic sites in 18 countries, from prehistoric
Stonehenge
to Ancient Rome’s vanished
Pompeii
and the mystical wooden
Kyoto temples
. The sites are natural as well as man-made, ranging from the sandy dunes of Australia’s
Shark Bay
to the rocky cliffs of America’s
Yosemite National Park
.
The World Wonders Project is the latest creation of the Google
Cultural Institute
, opened in Paris last year. Under the institute’s auspices, we have launched a series of exciting initiatives, ranging from the publication of high resolution images of the
Dead Sea Scrolls
to the digitization the archives of famous figures such as
Nelson Mandela
. For the World Wonders Project, we’ve worked with a prestigious set of partners including
UNESCO
, the
World Monuments Fund
,
Getty Images
and
Ourplace
. The partners have supplied official information and photographs.
In order to create World Wonders, we took our
Street View
technology to a new level. Most of the these historic sites could not be filmed by car. We needed to use camera-carrying trikes and pedal our way close enough. Street View helps millions each day make travel plans or get a helping hand with geography homework. With World Wonders, Street View supports preserving and promoting some of the world’s most significant monuments for future generations.
Our launch event took place today in Madrid. We chose Spain because the country enjoys a particularly rich architectural heritage, including 12 Wonders’ sites. There’s the old cities of
Salamanca
,
Toledo
,
Cuenca
,
Santiago de Compostela
and
Córdoba
, the
Roman aqueduct in Segovia
and
Roman walls in Lugo
, and the
archeological dig in Tárraco
. The Wonders website is launching in Spanish, as well as English, French, Italian, Hebrew and Japanese. The World Wonders Project YouTube channel adds a video dimension.
By bringing these sites online, we’re aiming to encourage visitors to travel to these fabulous sites. Many museum curators involved in our Art Project report spikes in entries after viewing their collections on their computers.
This project provides significant educational benefits. A
section
on the site offers valuable resources for teachers in primary and secondary schools, which enable them to teach history and geography in innovative ways. Educational packages for classroom use can be downloaded free of charge from the World Wonders website.
When I was a child, flipping through encyclopedias while researching for school projects, the thought of exploring the world’s famous historic and cultural sites was a distant dream. Today that dream becomes a little closer for all of us.
Posted by Melanie Blaschke, Product Marketing Manager, World Wonders Project
A victory for the web in France
Tuesday, May 29, 2012
Today is an important day for the Web. A French court rejected claims from France’s largest television broadcaster
TF1
that
YouTube
has violated its copyright.
The case reaches back to March 2008 when TF1 sued YouTube over copyright infringement by making available of several of their TV programs on YouTube: TF1 claimed more than EUR140 million in damages.
The overall decision is a victory for everyone who uses the Web. Every day, hundreds of millions of people use computers and mobile devices, tablets and televisions to freely exchange ideas and information. After this decision, these creators can be secure to post their materials on YouTube and other platforms and we can host their content without fearing a giant liability. The end result will be more videos posted on the Net, more revenue generated for creative artists, and more exposure to a global audience for these artists. Already, we have deals in place with 3,000 media groups around the world, including important French partners such as
BFM
,
Arte
and
AFP.
The verdict demonstrates how the Internet is enriching French culture. Over the past year, we have signed contracts with five French collecting societies to pay royalties to French writers, musicians, and other artists. More generally, we have a major investment plan for the French economy and culture, demonstrating how committed we are to France.
By embracing the Web, this verdict moves France a step forward to further benefit from Internet’s massive economic and cultural opportunity. We hope this judgement will allow us to build
constructive partnerships
and bring more French language content online. Watch this space!
Posted by Christophe Muller, Head of YouTube partnerships, Southern Europe, Middle East and Africa
Helping kids answer Chancellor Merkel’s question
Monday, May 28, 2012
“How are we going to learn?”, asked German Chancellor Angela Merkel in February 2012, as she launched a “
Future Dialogue
” with citizens. At this year’s
Vision Summit
in Potsdam, Google was able to play a part in supporting a rather unusual group of education experts: twenty pupils and students aged 14 to 22 trying to come up with possible answers to Mrs Merkel’s question.
The teams used used
Chromebooks
provided by us, Tumblr’s microblogging service and other online tools to keep track of their many ideas. The youngsters discussed dropping single-subject lessons from the curriculum altogether - instead, students should work on projects that combine maths, science, languages and other subjects in an integrated learning environment. They were also keen to integrate the web into their answers, suggesting collaborative working and information sharing - via online tools and wikis.
At the end of the event, the teams’ ideas were presented to the 1500 attendees at the Vision Summit. Afterwards, they spoke to an audience of another 300, among them journalists, photographers and TV crews at the Brandenburg Gate, just a few hundred meters from the Chancellor’s office. It was an appropriate setting to offer some potential answers to Chancellor Merkel’s question.
Posted by Ralf Bremer, Senior Manager Communications and Public Affairs, Germany
Rebooting computer science education in the UK
Friday, May 25, 2012
Last August
, Eric Schmidt lamented the sorry state of computer science education in UK schools. Since then we’ve been in discussion with various educational groups about ways we might help.
Through our grant programmes like
CS4HS
and
RISE
, we’ve long supported educational schemes of merit in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. But we wanted to do more.
One key issue stood out in particular -- the lack of qualified people able to teach computing as a science. So this week,
speaking at London’s Science Museum
, Eric announced a partnership between Google and TeachFirst, which we hope will help - in at least a small way - address the teacher shortfall.
From
Eric at Science Museum
Teach First
is a UK charity which recruits exceptional graduates and puts them to work in the most challenging schools. Google has provided funds for them to train and support more than 100 first rate science teachers over the next three years, with the majority focused on computer science. Overall we anticipate this should help more than 20,000 pupils from the most disadvantaged UK communities.
It should take just a few months for the benefits to begin. After undergoing an intensive training course this summer, the first batch of Teach First recruits will be placed into schools where they can make a difference right away, whilst receiving on the job mentoring and training for a further 2 years.
And to ensure they aren’t held back by a lack of equipment, we’ll also provide each computer science recruit with a small bursary to purchase teaching aids, such as
Raspberry Pi
or
Arduino
starter kits.
Rebooting computer science education won’t be straightforward, and it will take a generation coming through schools before we see a real difference. But that’s even more reason to start today.
Posted by Peter Barron, Director, External Relations, EMEA
Transparency for copyright removals in search
Friday, May 25, 2012
Cross-posted from the
Official Google Blog
We believe that openness is crucial for the future of the Internet. When something gets in the way of the free flow of information, we believe there should be transparency around what that block might be.
So two years ago we launched the
Transparency Report
, showing when and what information is accessible on Google services around the world. We
started off
by sharing data about the government requests we receive to
remove content
from our services or for
information about our users
. Then we began showing
traffic patterns
to our services, highlighting when they’ve been
disrupted
.
Today we’re expanding the Transparency Report with a
new section on copyright
. Specifically, we’re disclosing the number of requests we get from copyright owners (and the organizations that represent them) to remove Google Search results because they allegedly link to infringing content. We’re starting with search because we remove more results in response to copyright removal notices than for any other reason. So we’re providing information about
who sends
us copyright removal notices, how often, on behalf of which
copyright owners
and for
which websites
. As policymakers and Internet users around the world consider the pros and cons of
different proposals
to address the problem of online copyright infringement, we hope this data will contribute to the discussion.
For this launch we’re disclosing data dating from July 2011, and moving forward we plan on updating the numbers each day. As you can see from the
report
, the number of requests has been increasing rapidly. These days it’s not unusual for us to receive more than 250,000 requests
each week
, which is more than what copyright owners asked us to remove in all of 2009. In the past month alone, we received about 1.2 million requests made on behalf of more than 1,000 copyright owners to remove search results. These requests targeted some 24,000 different websites.
Fighting online piracy is very important, and we don’t want our search results to direct people to materials that violate copyright laws. So we’ve always responded to copyright removal requests that meet the standards set out in the
Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA). At the same time, we want to be transparent about the process so that users and researchers alike understand what kinds of materials have been removed from our search results and why. To promote that transparency, we have long shared copies of copyright removal requests with
Chilling Effects
, a nonprofit organization that collects these notices from Internet users and companies. We also include a notice in our search results when items have been removed in response to copyright removal requests.
We believe that the time-tested
“notice-and-takedown”
process for copyright strikes the right balance between the needs of copyright owners, the interests of users, and our efforts to provide a useful Google Search experience. Google continues to put substantial resources into improving and streamlining this process. We already mentioned that we’re processing more copyright removal requests for Search than ever before. And we’re also processing these requests faster than ever before; last week our average turnaround time was less than 11 hours.
At the same time, we try to catch erroneous or abusive removal requests. For example, we recently rejected two requests from an organization representing a major entertainment company, asking us to remove a search result that linked to a major newspaper’s review of a TV show. The requests mistakenly claimed copyright violations of the show, even though there was no infringing content. We’ve also seen baseless copyright removal requests being used for anticompetitive purposes, or to remove content unfavorable to a particular person or company from our search results. We try to catch these ourselves, but we also notify webmasters in our
Webmaster Tools
when pages on their website have been targeted by a copyright removal request, so that they can
submit a counter-notice
if they believe the removal request was inaccurate.
Transparency is a crucial element to making this system work well. We look forward to making more improvements to our Transparency Report—offering copyright owners, Internet users, policymakers and website owners the data they need to see and understand how removal requests from both governments and private parties affect our results in Search.
Update
December 11, 2012
: Starting today, anyone interested in studying the data can
download
all the data shown for
copyright removals
in the
Transparency Report
. We are also providing information about how often we remove search results that link to allegedly infringing material. Specifically, we are disclosing how many URLs we removed for each
request
and
specified website
, the overall removal rate for each request and the specific URLs we did not act on. Between December 2011 and November 2012, we removed 97.5% of all URLs specified in copyright removal requests. Read more on
Policy by the Numbers
.
Posted by Fred von Lohmann, Senior Copyright Counsel
Partnering with Missing Children Europe
Friday, May 25, 2012
Missing Children Europe
and its member organisations do vital work finding missing or sexually exploited children - and supporting their families in time of crisis with emotional, social and legal help via the European
116000 telephone hotline
.
Google has been
working with the group for a while
and we’re pleased to report that the first part of our collaboration with them is now live, in time for International Missing Children’s Day, today. Thanks to
Google technology
embedded in their website, it’s now possible to search for publicly available information across all MCE member websites at the same time.
The European Commission is hosting a
conference
next week in Brussels to raise awareness about the vital work of the European 116000 Missing Children hotline. If children go missing, relatives can call the hotline and speak with specialists. Today, Missing Children Europe launched a promotional film short called “Futures”, which will run on TV, in cinemas and on YouTube:
These are great examples of how technology can help to make both the online and offline worlds a better place for children, in line with our commitments we made when we signed up to the Commission's
Better Internet for Kids
coalition. We’ll continue working with Missing Children Europe and its members in coming months to help them share information and work together more effectively using our technology.
Posted by Marco Pancini, Senior Policy Counsel
Big Tent comes home
Thursday, May 24, 2012
How should children stay safe online? When does cracking down on pornography morph into censorship? Has the social media revolution enhanced or diminished our society? How can we reconcile copyright with the split-second creations and sharing of the digital age? Our
Big Tent
returned to its birthplace to the UK this week to take on these tough issues.
For the debate on pornography and child safety, we invited one of our fiercest critics, the
Daily Mai
l. Columnist Amanda Platell outlined her newspaper’s campaign for government-mandated filters for adult content online while Andrew Heaney of TalkTalk, a UK based Internet Service Provider described his company’s
network-based filter
. On the other side of the debate,
Index on Censorship’s
new chief executive Kirsty Hughes and Google’s UK Public Policy director Sarah Hunter warned of the risks - both practical and in principle - of filtering.
From the serious subject of adult content, we took a quirky but informative break to watch Aleks Krotoski demonstrate her
Serendipity Engine
, an algorithmic contraption of bicycle parts and light bulbs.
Last year, our executive chairman Eric Schmidt
urged the UK
to reform its computer science education, helping spark a nationwide debate. At this year’s event, he addressed a range of issues from how the next five billion people to come online will shape the web to his concerns about privacy and criminality online. In response a question about the disruptive nature of technology, he answered,“If you thought when you got your job at 20 that it would never change you were misinformed. Retrain yourself to be curious.”
UK Universities and Science Minister
David Willetts
addressed concern that university debt is threatening aspiring entrepreneurs, speaking of the importance of promoting innovation clusters and how big data and text analysis can fuel growth.
For this year’s Big Tent we partnered with the
Music Managers Forum
, the world’s largest representative body of artist management. MMF’s Chairman, Brian Message, challenged to Geoff Taylor of the
BPI
to spend more time thinking about innovation than legislation. TV comedy writer
Graham Linehan
raised laughs when he said he thought films would get better if people were asked to pay when they leave the cinema.
We also heard from journalists who are integrating digital media and user content into news storytelling - from local news in Australia's Northern Territory, to hard hitting social media fuelled reporting on Arab protests, to understanding the London riots through the lens of data.
The day concluded with a debate between two authors whose new books examine the impact of the social web on society and individuals.
Andrew Keen
and
Nick Harkaway
debated the question of whether the social revolution has enhanced or diminished our society. While coming from different perspectives, Keen and Harkaway did agree that Internet users should take more active decisions in how they use services online to ensure they protect themselves and their data.
The Big Tent programme heads to Dublin, Cannes and Tel Aviv next and the content from the UK event will be available on our
YouTube channel
soon.
Posted by Jon Steinberg, External Relations
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