Stanford Center for Internet and Society

Author: Matt Kellogg

In the Northern District of California, the District Court granted Google’s motion to dismiss in a suit claiming that Google had been complicit in fraud perpetrated through its AdWords program. Because the plaintiff did not allege that Google had helped to develop the offending content, Google was immune under § 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which shields website operators from liability for hosting unlawful content created by third parties.

Author: Matt Kellogg

Google recently reached a settlement agreement with the authors and publishers who in 2005 sued the company for copyright infringement. As part of the arrangement, copyright owners will not only receive fees from Google for the use of digitized copies of their books in Google Book Search, they will also have the ability to choose how much—if any—of their works they wish to be displayed. The settlement provides for the creation of an independent organization to oversee its administration as well as special modes of access for public and university libraries.

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