Stanford Center for Internet and Society

In case you have not seen it yet, here’s James Gleick’s OP-ED in the NYT, discussing the settlement between Google and book authors and publishers. The interesting point he makes is that the new business model should increase the quality of published books.

Viacom accused Google's video sharing website, YouTube of violating its copyright in a $1 billion lawsuit. And as of last week, Google and Viacom reached an agreement to allow Google's YouTube to mask important user information from records before the handover to Viacom. Law.com bloggers and co-hosts, J. Craig Williams and Bob Ambrogi welcome Attorney Kevin A. Thompson from the firm Davis McGrath LLC, and Lauren Gelman, Executive Director of Stanford Law School's Center for Internet and Society to discuss this case. They will discuss the legal issues, privacy rights, piracy issues and what this case means for the users, the source of business for these companies.

I've been reading through a study of Google's patents prepared by Stephen Arnold entitled Google Version 2.0: The Predator.

Earlier this week Google's CEO Eric Schmidt was quoted saying that YouTube is “very close” to turning on a filtering system that should prevent copyright content from being uploaded to the video site. At the moment it is not clear how exactly this filtering system will work.

Anyone still in doubt whether user data is valuable? Take a look at the news and learn: User data is worth the double of what Google paid for YouTube –– Google just bought DoubleClick for USD 3.1 bn.

'Surveillance and You' is the title of this years Civic Forum of the Science, Technology & Society Program at UT Austin. The one day event will host an expert panel of academics as well as former CIA officers and armed forces members.

Search is becoming an increasingly important topic in cyberlaw. After several sessions and conferences looking at the issue (including at CFP 2004, Yale Law School and in Berlin), Niva Elkin-Koren and Michael Birnhack from the University of Haifa in Israel have now put together a great conference on The Law of Search Engines, which I am currently attending. I won't do a full blogging of the conference, but I just wanted to make a few notes of what I found particularly interesting:

This is too funny. I had to share it here. Check out Chris Pirillo's comparison of YouTube vs. GoogleVideo vs. Revver. When I do the comparison from my DSL w/ a macbook, it seems like the YouTube and Revver sites load and run fine. The Google Video one (in the middle), however, keeps buffering and stalling... In a

I've just posted a new SSRN working paper on keywording advertising in search engines. Comments are welcome.