Documentary throws the book at Google scanning project

In "Google and the World Brain", Ben Lewis' thoughtful new documentary about the search giant's effort to scan all the world's books (link to the documentary shows a trailer of the movie).  

The most arresting moment takes place in a monastery high above Catalonia in Spain.  The film's globetrotting crew is interviewing Father Damiá Roure, who runs the library at the Benedictine abbey of Montserrat, about what happened when Google came to digitize the library's collection.   

The monk's mixed feelings about the book-scanning project are mirrored by many interviewees in the 89-minute documentary, which premiered this week at the Sundance Film Festival.   While the film contains interviews with people who question whether a corporation should be able to own the world's knowledge, it also offers a relatively straightforward account of the Google Books project and the legal case against it. At the end it credits Google with galvanizing public libraries into putting more of their collections online.  

Google began scanning books in 2002, relatively early in its history, working with major university libraries around the globe. By 2005 the company had scanned more than 10 million books, with more than half of them still protected by copyright. In the autumn of that year, the Author's Guild filed a class action lawsuit against Google, seeking damages for its writers and new protections for digital copies of copyrighted works.

After three years of intensive negotiations, Google and the Author's Guild emerged with a 350-page settlement agreement. Among other things, Google agreed to give authors in the suit $60 per copyrighted work, in exchange for the right to start selling digital books online. And it's this point that turns out, strangely, to be the real start of the film, as what the filmmakers describe as "a ragbag army of authors, helped by the occasional librarian" come together to protest the settlement and, in 2011, successfully get it rejected by a federal judge.

We'll talk about this case when we discuss copyrights.    Read more...

French Twitter Lawsuit Pits Free Speech Against Hate Speech

Twitter is developed by Americans but is used around the world.   Legal and cultural systems, especially in Europe, often clash about privacy issues and hate speech.    You can listen to or download the transcript.  Here is brief summary.  Look at the trackback link below for more details about what happened in October, when the news broke.

A French judge will decide this week if Twitter must hand over the identities of users sending anti-Semitic tweets. The case, brought against Twitter by a Jewish student organization, pits America's free speech guarantees against Europe's laws banning hate speech.

The controversy began in October, when the French Union of Jewish Students threatened to sue Twitter to get the names of people posting anti-Semitic tweets with the hashtag #unbonjuif, or "a good Jew."

"If I type 'un bon Juif' ... I can see it was full of tweets against Jews," says Eli Petit, vice president of the Jewish student organization. "It was written, for example, 'A good Jew is a dead Jew,' 'A good Jew is a burned Jew.'"


For Christopher Mesnooh, an American lawyer who practices in France, the case is a "classic example of a clash of cultures that shows up in the way different legal systems deal with the same issue....  In the United States, we give virtually absolute protection to free speech — even if it's offensive to different minorities," he says.

"Europe, France and Germany in particular have taken   a different direction. What they have decided is that because of what happened during the Holocaust and World War II more generally, that certain kinds of speech, when directed at minorities, has to be circumscribed or even prevented," he says.

Do you think what Twitter did  was reasonable or is this hate speech that requires identifying the culprits? 

Tweets from Hurricane Sandy

I found this link from iRevolution.net.  It's a great website, and this YouTube video is a visualization of how tweets spread as Hurricane Sandy hit eastern coast.   There is also a lot of research and websites on using social media for emergency response.

Facebook's Graphic Search

As we saw briefly in class, Facebook announced their new Graph Search.  Here is an article (of the many that have been covered in pretty much all online and print news links) that shows you how it works, what it offers, etc.  What do you think?  Another gimmick or a real challenge to Google?

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2013/01/15/169436642/facebook-unveils-new-graph-search-adding-a-new-pillar-to-services

Some ideas for Assignment 1

  Assignment 1 on Technology and Values asks you to find an article or story where existing or proposed computer-based technology has significant implications for one of the five values associated with the Envisioning Cards.   I find them all the time.  So in the interest of helping you out, here are topics you can find in most major tech journals and news outlets.  Remember to look at my "Blog List" available on this blog.  I thought about giving you an example, but we ran through a few in class.  Here are some topics to consider:

• Copyright protection (music is the one you think of first, mostly because Napster hit the headlines) but from an economic standpoint motion pictures, software, video games, and publishing, to name a few, are bigger piece of the economic pie.  
• copyrights depends crucially on technology
• lots of stakeholders, lots of value conflicts
• it's not just about stealing being bad; it's much more complex than that. 
• Privacy trade-offs
• vs. security
• non-transparency
• monitoring
• Latest electronics, games, etc.
• Crowdsourcing innovations
• Disrupted technologies
• Clean technologies
• Online versions of college courses. Is it a fad or is higher education about to get the overhaul it needs?
• Heard a Science Friday today (11/11) about cancer research and genetic testing to find genetic mutations as a way to treat cancer in new ways.  Sounds pretty clear cut, but no technology is a win-win remember, so consider the values, stakeholders, non-intended uses.
• Read recently in the NY Times (11/7/13) that Disney Parks are going digital.  Visitors would wear rubber bracelets encoded with credit card information, "snapping up corn dogs and Mickey Mouse ears with a tap of the wrist. Smart phones alerts would signal when it is time to ride Space Mountain without standing in line."  It's supposed to happen this spring.  The idea: "If we can enhance the experience, more people will spend more of their leisure time with us."
• On the same page in the NYTimes (11/7/13), major media cable companies threaten to drop underperforming channels that are mostly on their own (e.g., Al Gore's Current TV was dropped by Time Warner and then recently sold to Al Jazeera).  But even though large distributors have talked about belt-tightening, two things are different now: potential Web competitors are creeping up (e.g., Crackle.com and the like), and creeping costs, particularly for sports casters and broadcasters.  The article goes on to talk about many other channels getting the ax and protests against it.

Hope this helps and doesn't overwhelm.