Digging Books The Digital Way

Google’s efforts to run the world’s largest digital library have hit a roadblock, but the ultimate outcome of this legal battle has serious implications for future access to book content.

A New York federal district court rejected a deal between Google, the word’s largest search engine, and lawyers for authors and publishers that would have settled a class-action suit brought against Google Books by the Authors Guild, a publishing industry trade group.

“While the digitalization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many, the (settlement) would simply go too far,’’ a court document explains.

“It would permit this class action – which was brought against defendant Google Inc. to challenge its scanning of books and display of 'snippets' for online searching – to implement a forward-looking business arrangement that would grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners.”

The court added the $125 million settlement “would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case.”

WMB appreciates monopoly concerns and authorship rights. But let’s face facts: This legal battle is more about money than access to out-of-print works. If somebody wants to compete with Google in its digitalizing of books, the marketplace should handle it, not the courts.

Secret Price Deals?

Google, under the settlement, would have received the right to display excerpts of out-of-print books, even if they are not in the public domain or authorized by publishers to appear in Google Books, which has digitalized over 12 million books.

When the settlement was initially announced in mid-2009, opposition flooded in from lawyers on behalf of Microsoft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a coalition called the Open Book Alliance which decried it as anticompetitive.

“Google and the plaintiff publishers secretly negotiated for 29 months to produce a horizontal price fixing combination, effected and reinforced by a digital book distribution monopoly,’’ a lawyer for the Open Book Alliance said at the time.

“Their guile has cleared much of the field in digital book distribution, shielding Google from meaningful competition.”

The rejected settlement was revised, primarily to deal with objections coming from the European Union, but concerns remained that it would give Google too much power over out-of-print book titles.

The Authors Guild, which filed the class action suit in 2005, says it chose to settle rather than head for a court battle because it didn't want to repeat the well-publicized mistakes the music industry made while policing digital piracy.

The guild claimed Google was scanning books still under copyright protection.

“We believe this agreement has the potential to open up access to millions of books that are currently hard to find in the U.S. today,” says Google managing counsel Hilary Ware. “Regardless of the outcome, we'll continue to work to make more of the world's books discoverable online through Google Books and Google eBooks.”

The Bigger Issue

WMB agrees with Ware that the bigger issue in this battle is public access, with due compensation to the authors and their descendants.

If some book remains out of print and not digitalized online, the content stays unavailable. Nobody gains.

Google’s book efforts allow researchers, genealogists, and the public at large to rediscover printed works that otherwise would be lost to the ages. Some publishers of rare books or out-of-print books do so today only on demand and at a price that may be unaffordable.

Instead of condemning Google, perhaps its competitors should develop their own business model for digitalizing books. Google does not hold all the cards when it comes to ideas and free enterprise.

WMB suspects some of the competition (Microsoft, for example) is just sorry it didn’t beat Google to the punch in book digitalization. Of course, Microsoft has no monopoly!

Ken Cocuzzo

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Don’t Take My Pen Away!

Advances in technology often bring excitement, entertainment and engaging social connection into our daily lives. But there’s a dark side to dumping aging tech: the ever-higher consumer cost for new gadgets.

Surely you must have some of these dinosaurs: pre-recorded cassettes, CDs, vinyl albums, VHS tapes, computers running Windows XP (or earlier), “dumb cell phones” – the list goes to infinity and beyond (my apologies to Disney-Pixar's Buzz Lightyear).

Some of these things were thrown over the side simply because something newer, flashier and different came along. We may have grumbled while shelling out more dough for these “improvements,” but we did it anyway to stay ahead of the pack or keep up with neighbors, family and friends.

And what became of the old-tech items? Did we recycle them, or did they wind up taking valuable space inside our homes, where they were jammed into dark closets in hopes of one day re-emerging for use? Worse yet, they may have gone to the landfill.

Our options are narrowing by the day, and now cassettes have been officially consigned to the technology graveyard, where bulky analogue TVs were interred after sleek digital flat-screen TVs dazzled us.

The New York Times reports the 2010 Lexus SC 430 was the last model to offer a cassette deck as an option, writes Dick Eastman, who blogs on computers, technology and genealogy. (My last car with a cassette player was a 1996 Saturn).

For the 2011 model year, no manufacturer selling cars in the United States offers a tape player either as standard equipment or as an option on a new vehicle, according to the Times.

“Actually, CD players are also on the way out as they are being replaced with hard drives containing MP3 files as well as by MP3 players that connect via an external input jack,’’ Eastman says. “It is now cheaper and more practical to plug your iPod into the automobile's stereo system than to carry tapes or CDs.’’

I have tons of cassettes, CDs and vinyl records gathering dust in my house. As each was replaced by something else, I told myself I needed to keep up with the times and tech changes. But to whose benefit?

Putting aside durability, quality, and portability issues, there were practical considerations such as the cost of converting my favorite music from the earlier format to the new format.

Even if I found a cost-effective option for music transfer, how would I find enough time to sort through and “upgrade” vast collections?

Perhaps the greatest example of change for the sake of change is Microsoft’s Windows operating systems for PCs and laptops.

One can certainly say XP (three service packs later) is a much better system than the breakthrough Windows 95, but what about the crash-prone Millennium, dull as dishwater Vista, and now the non-compatible Windows 7?

We all understand the need for profits, but must we tolerate the greed that says you can sell consumers on the notion of tech improvements while offering only incremental advancements?

Let’s face it, most of us could continue on Windows XP if Microsoft chose to refine and improve the aging system still used by many homes and businesses.

But there’s no real incentive for the company; it can't make piles of money off previous technology. Microsoft, and its shareholders, would love it if we all dumped XP, like yesterday's newspaper (still read one?).

The sad fact of living in our tech-hungry consumer-based society is that new is not necessarily better, just more expensive and complicated. Like good writing, simplicity in tech is doable and desirable, just not always at the top of the product list.

Forgive me for cutting this post short: I have to look for a new ribbon cartridge for my electric typewriter – yes, I still have one, and it works!

Ken Cocuzzo

ChinaWatch: No Beef With Clouds

Welcome to ChinaWatch, WMB’s digest of news from the country with the world’s second largest economy. Click the links for more info.


Cloud Computing Boosted

Microsoft Corp. will collaborate with China Mobile Communications Corp., parent of the world’s biggest phone carrier by market value, on developing technologies including cloud computing for Chinese businesses.

Microsoft, the world’s biggest software company, and China Mobile also will partner on information services for businesses, wireless devices, sales and distribution, Bloomberg Businessweek reports.

The companies bet businesses in the world’s fastest-growing major economy will increase spending on computing services and applications accessed through the Internet instead of through individual corporate servers. International Business Machines Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. also are boosting development of cloud services.

A cloud service has three distinct characteristics that differentiate it from traditional hosting over the Internet. It is sold on demand, typically by the minute or the hour; it is elastic, a user can have as much or as little of a service at any given time; and the service is fully managed by the provider (the consumer needs nothing but a computer and Internet access).

By March, 90 percent of Redmond, Wash.-based Microsoft’s engineers will be working on cloud-related products, Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer says. State-owned China Mobile Communications owns 74 percent of Hong Kong-listed China Mobile Ltd., which has more than 500 million mobile-phone users.

IBM, based in Armonk, N.Y., plans to spend $20 billion on acquisitions in the next five years as the world’s biggest computing-services company invests in operations that include cloud computing, Chief Executive Officer Sam Palmisano says.

Where’s The Beef?

Talks between U.S. and Chinese officials led to a set of agreements that address some of the core trade grievances raised by U.S. firms which do business – or want to – in the fast-growing Chinese economy, The Washington Post reports.

Although the U.S. side refrains from describing the agreements as a major breakthrough – the list of trade issues between the two countries remains long, and enforcement of prior trade promises has sometimes been lax – officials were buoyed by the result as the Obama administration fights to boost U.S. exports.

The agreements will produce improvements in areas such as China's protection of intellectual property rights, says U.S. trade representative Ron Kirk, who co-chaired meetings with a Chinese delegation led by Wang Qishan, vice premier.

Ranchers, effectively barred from the Chinese market since 2003 after a scare over mad cow disease, will get renewed access to China and potentially billions of dollars in new sales.

Alternative-energy companies will no longer have to build demonstration projects in China before bidding on wind projects there; telecommunications firms will avoid rules that favor locally-developed technology; government industrial catalogs will be rewritten so they are not biased against imported equipment and capital goods; and software companies should benefit as Chinese government agencies are pressed to use only legally-licensed software.

That final commitment, U.S. officials say, will be overseen by Wang – elevating to a high level of government an issue that has been of long-standing concern to U.S. firms which lose revenue to widespread piracy of software and other intellectual property.

New Computing Boon Beckons

Digital technology boosts many facets of research and development, with the computer serving as the single biggest invention drawing us into the future. Nowhere is that more apparent than with recent innovations in hardware architecture and growing use of multicore computer processing units.

The generalization of graphics processing units, and the imminent leap available between CPU and GPU cores, make a new era of interactive graphics possible. As a result, we will begin to see PCs and gaming consoles with unprecedented levels of color saturation, realism, and “immersiveness.”
But current graphics programming models known as Application Programming Interfaces were developed for the previous-generation GPU-only rendering pipelines. This severely hampers the type and quality of images possible on these systems.

Interactive Graphics Driving Innovation

Programmable graphics is the next step in interactive graphics development. This new era of imagery will cooperatively use the CPU, GPU, and complex data structures to efficiently synthesize future images according to next-generation software apps.

Next-generation interactive graphics programming models for these architectures are being developed and require new programming models, tools, and rendering systems designed to take full advantage of these new parallel heterogeneous systems. New graphics techniques, algorithms, and rendering engines that showcase unprecedented visual quality are making these images possible.

The single-processor computer is being replaced by parallel heterogeneous systems made up of processors supporting multiple styles of computation. CPU architects are no longer able to improve computational performance of the traditional heart of the computer system.

Instead of increasing clock speed, engineers are now providing a rapidly-increasing number of parallel coarse-grained cores, currently capable of delivering approximately 90 GFLOPS. (GFLOPS is 1 billion floating point operations per second).

Simultaneously, graphics processing units have evolved to be efficient fine-grained data-parallel co-processors that deliver much greater raw floating-point horsepower than today’s multi-core CPUs. New processors from AMD can produce 400 GFLOPS of peak performance via hundreds of computational units working in parallel.

In addition, although CPUs and GPUs have traditionally been separated by low-bandwidth and high-latency communication pathways, rapidly-improving interconnect technology (for example, AMD Torrenza and Intel Geneseo) and the promise of integrating CPUs and GPUs on a single chip (for example, AMD Fusion) allow CPUs and GPUs to share data much more efficiently. This enables graphics applications to intermix computational styles to optimally use the system’s computational resources.

Interactive 3D computer graphics is now the most computationally demanding consumer application. The economic force of the computer gaming industry and its appetite for computational power have driven the rapid development of current GPUs. In addition, the GPU programming model represents perhaps the only widely-adopted parallel programming model to date.

Unfortunately, this model assumes a GPU-only, unidirectional fixed-graphics pipeline. Creating a new programming model for interactive graphics which fully exposes the computational and communication abilities of these new architectures is necessary to enable a revolution in the quality and efficiency of interactive graphics and provide a killer app for these platforms.

The last five years have seen a significant amount of innovation in interactive graphics software and hardware; GPUs have progressed from being configurable fixed-function processors to highly-programmable data-parallel co-processors, while CPUs have evolved from single-core to task-parallel multicore processors.

The promise of programmable graphics illustrates the fact that GPU programmability has implications for computer graphics. User-defined data structures and algorithms are bringing tremendous flexibility, efficiency, and image quality improvements to interactive rendering.

What Our Future Could Bring

We are at the threshold of a new era of interactive computer graphics. We are no longer limited to today’s brute force, unidirectional rendering pipeline. Developers will soon be able to design adaptive, demand-driven renderers that efficiently and easily leverage all processors in new heterogeneous parallel systems.

New rendering algorithms that tightly couple the distinct capabilities of the CPU and the GPU will generate far richer and more realistic imagery, use processor resources more efficiently, and scale to hundreds both CPU and GPU cores.

We believe this new technology will be a boon for processor and chip manufacturers, including Intel and AMD. As applications such as 3D become more sophisticated, consumers will embrace these new technologies with vigor.

Apple, Google, Microsoft and other companies will seize new opportunities as the hardware and software technologies continue to evolve.

This post is from TechMan, WMB co-author who blogs about trends, issues and ideas affecting business, industry, technology and consumers.

Google TV Brings It Home

If Google has its way, our TVs will not only provide regular channel programming but offer options such as surfing Web sites, watching videos or listening to music. Computers are clearly transitioning from the home office to the living room and Google, the online search leader, is driving this shift by launching Google TV in September.

Google recently announced it’s working with partners Sony and Logitech to integrate Google TV inside television, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. This new product is planned for sale in September and will be initially introduced by Best Buy stores in the United States. The Internet giant is expected to offer the same product category internationally in 2011.

“With the Web, finding and accessing interesting content is fast and often as easy as a search, according to a statement by Google. “But the Web still lacks many of the great features and the high-quality viewing experience that TV offers. So that got us thinking … what if we helped people experience the best TV and the best Web in one seamless experience?”

Google TV follows the not-so-successful attempts of Apple and Microsoft to bring the Internet to television with Apple TV and MSN TV. However, Google believes there is an enormous market opportunity since there are over 4 billion people around the world watching TV.

For seamless viewing, a relatively fast connection around 3 MB per second is required. But since 3G technology has been evolving rapidly, this should not pose much of a problem, especially if Google TV is delayed until 2011. The browser for Google TV is simply the Linux version of Google Chrome. The user interface will be modified for TV so a Web site designed for a smaller monitor can display in a larger format for television.

Android software also will be used to power Google TV. With the browser built in, Google plans to help us to access to our favorite Web sites and move easily between TV and the Internet. Television will become a photo slide show viewer, a gaming utility, a music player, a home theater, and much more.

Google TV will use a search engine to accommodate a fast and easy way to navigate TV channels, Web sites, apps, shows and movies.

For example, if you know which show you want to watch, a search engine can help you find it on the Web or TV channel. One also can browse using a standard programming guide, your DVR, or your Google TV home screen. Since Google TV is built on open platforms, like Android and Google Chrome, these features are just a fraction of what Google TV can do, according to a Google blog.

“In our announcement at Google I/O (in San Francisco), we challenged TV Web developers to start coming up with the next great Web and Android apps designed specifically for the TV experience. Developers can start optimizing their Web sites,” Google says.

Google has been working on Google TV for over two years, but analysts are not exactly “gung-ho’’ about Google TV.

The space is very competitive. For instance, Samsung, LG and Panasonic outsell Sony (Google’s TV partner) in the LCD TV space and they all have their own Internet protocol TV solutions and partners. LG partnered with DivX earlier this year to bring DivX TV to its Blu-ray players. Samsung and Yahoo have partnered with (Internet)@TV, and Panasonic created its Viera Cast system.

Yet other analysts say that with the exception of the standalone Web browser, Google TV is very similar to the latest version of TiVo.

Features like viewing photos, streaming music and searching for upcoming programming were possible as early as 2003. Moreover, the viewer could view content from Amazon Video-On Demand, YouTube and Netflix in 2007.

Further, there are competing box products, such as Boxee, PopBox and Roku. Boxee, for example, has established a base of users via its computer and Apple TV platform. Boxee doesn’t integrate into the live TV experience like Google TV, but it supports third-party apps, does regular Web browsing and links to existing media libraries. Cable companies also will continue to pose serious competition.

Apple and Microsoft missed the mark in their efforts to link computers with TV. To this day, Apple continues to sell the Apple TV product but in small numbers. The original Web TV was purchased by Microsoft and rebranded as MSN TV. Microsoft continues to support existing customers but no longer offers the hardware.

Time will tell, but since Google has such a strong presence as a search engine (an estimated 65 percent share of the browser market, leaving Yahoo and Bing well behind), it is conceivable Google TV along with its Android operating system may gain traction quickly.

This post is by TechMan, WMB co-author who blogs about trends, issues and ideas affecting business, industry, technology and consumers.

Microsoft: 800-lb Gorilla Bites PC

There’s plenty of positive to say about Microsoft’s contributions to the world: the Windows operating system, advancements in technology, and how all of it has transformed our lives and brought many of us closer than we ever thought possible.

But let’s be honest, it’s really a love-hate relationship we have with our desktops, laptops, netbooks and the rest. Why? Because like everything else human-based on the planet, the Windows operating system (aging XP probably is what most of us use to run our older PCs) is deeply flawed.

Not news you say? Sorry, you can click away but you can't hide from this corporate juggernaut and here's why.

It’s dreaded news every time Microsoft releases a security patch that forces us to make some really tough decisions. Should we allow the automatic update download and run the risk of it slowing or crashing our systems, or should we just simply ignore the old 800-pound gorilla Bill Gates fed and nurtured as a rising billionaire?

Reluctantly, you're probably better off downloading yet another patch from the Redmond, Wash.-based corporation. Ignoring security fixes really can have some unintentional but serious consequences, especially if you depend on your computer for business purposes. When was the last time you backed up your key client or customer files? Right, been meaning to get to it.

Dick Eastman, the driving force behind Eastman’s Online Genealogy Newsletter, recently explored the double-edged sword known as Microsoft, in particular the publicly-traded corporation's Internet Explorer browser (Version 8 now available for download). Eastman has considerable expertise in genealogy and computers – his experience with the latter spans more than 30 years.

“I have poked fun before at Microsoft's many security problems with Internet Explorer but this one is hilarious,'' Eastman says. "Microsoft has now issued a security advisory stating that pressing the F1 key on older versions of Windows systems running Internet Explorer can create huge problems. Hackers could use the vulnerability to take control of a user's system. The attack could come from a Web page, an HTML e-mail or an e-mail attachment, as long as Internet Explorer is used to display the file,” Eastman says.

The flaw has been found in systems running Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003, according to Eastman. “Microsoft says the issue is tied to the way that Visual Basic Scripting, or VBScript -- which is used for executing functions found in Web pages -- is linked with Windows Help files.

“In the case of an attack, a victim using Windows 2000, XP, or Server 2003 would only need to visit a malicious Web site where a dialog box would be presented, enticing users to press their F1 key,’’ Eastman says. “Once the key is pressed, the system is hijacked and malware is installed on the computer.”

As Eastman notes, the problem exists only in older versions of Internet Explorer on Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Server 2003. If you’re using one of these, you best be advised to visit Microsoft’s Web site and click on the menu for the proper security fixes.

Still, it’s not just MS security fixes were griping about at We Mean Business. There have been three major “service packs” for Windows XP and even downloading those presumably worthwhile upgrades have proved troublesome.

For example, many users of older computers (circa 2004-05) using Windows XP Service Pack 2 suffered total system meltdowns when they attempted to download Microsoft’s Service Pack 3.

It all came down to a few missing “drivers,” but that was never clearly explained beforehand. The “blue screen of death” gained many new victims when Service Pack 3 made the rounds, and the computer repair guys (yes, even the Geeks and Nerds) smiled all the way to the banks. Clean wipes were the order of the day (no backup? too bad, time to start fresh).

So what’s an intermediate-level PC user to do?

Educate yourself on what’s being downloaded automatically, especially if it looks vast, say four or five updates in one package. Take the time to visit Microsoft’s Web site and then decide if the update makes sense for you and your system. Weigh the risks versus the advantages.

Finally, don’t blindly download anything, even from Microsoft!

As for me, I practice what I preach at writenowworks.com.