WAR OF PERCEPTION

Google Makes Bid To Become World's Librarian

The proposed settlement between Google and US publishers must be resisted, argues Bill Thompson

Google is in the middle of a massive project to scan and digitise every book it can get its hands on, whether old or new, and if it gets its way then the US courts will soon endorse an agreement between the search engine giant and the US book industry that will allow it to do this without fear of prosecution for copyright infringement.

Authors and publishers will get some money in return, and we will all benefit from the improved access to digitised books that Google will provide.

The deal sounds like a good one, but not everyone is happy with it. The Department of Justice in the US has begun an investigation to see if it is anti-competitive, and last month a number of library associations got together with Amazon, Yahoo! and Microsoft to form the Open Book Alliance which argues that it should not go forward.

The details of the settlement are complex, and it is almost impossible to be sure what would emerge from it because many of the provisions involve setting up things like a Book Rights Registry, and we don't yet know what they will look like.

World's librarian

But whatever the detail there remains a fundamental problem. It is not that the settlement will give Google indemnity from prosecution should it be found to have scanned books that are in copyright without the copyright owner's position, nor even that it gives Google freedom to exploit scanned content commercially.

It is, rather, that the settlement gives only Google these privileges, and places one company in a prime position to become the world's de facto librarian instead of encouraging open access, open standards and a plurality of services and service providers.

Neither Google nor any other company should be entrusted with that responsibility, and nothing in the detail of the agreement or the funds that will be made available to authors as a consequence can change this.

If Google is given a monopoly, either explicitly in the settlement or implicitly because any other scanning project would be forced to negotiate its own multi-million dollar agreement, then the deal must be rejected.

The proposed settlement came about after Google began a project to scan and index millions of books, including many that are still in copyright.

It was sued by groups representing authors and publishers who felt that scanning books, even if the text was only used to create a searchable index which then pointed readers to the relevant text, was an unlicensed use and therefore illegal.

The book trade was also worried that Google might scan the books under the pretext of creating an index and then start offering them online or even selling them, even though it was always absolutely clear that such behaviour would be a breach of copyright.

Instead of fighting the case through the US courts and winning a great victory for those of us who believe that three hundred year-old notions of copyright should not be used arbitrarily to limit new ways of making use of creative works, Google announced in October 2008 that it had reached a settlement with the US Authors' Guild and the Association of American Publishers that would allow it to continue scanning with permission.

At the moment the settlement hangs in the balance, waiting for what is quaintly termed a 'fairness hearing' in US District Court on October 7.

At this hearing of the questions raised since the settlement was announced will be debated, including the question of how the relatively small Authors Guild came to speak for all published writers in the US, living and dead, in negotiating with Google.

One of the arguments being made in favour of Google, most clearly by US industry analyst Jeffrey Lindsay, is that Google deserves to benefit from having taken the risk of digitising books when the project's legal status was uncertain and that Google, unlike Microsoft and Yahoo!, has invested millions of dollars in the project and is committed to pushing forward.

Microsoft did indeed abandon its own book scanning project, Live Search Books, in 2008, largely on cost grounds but also because the legal uncertainties clearly exposed the company to potential liability in what was never a core area of its activity.

Tribal lands

But Lindsay's view seems hard to accept. Pretending that the world's libraries are some unexplored continent to be opened up and claimed by the adventurers from Mountain View may appeal to the frontier mentality of US commentators, but it is not a metaphor likely to have much appeal elsewhere.

For one thing the bookshelves of the worlds are already inhabited, just like the territory of the United States, and those of us who remember the fate of the Native Americans may not be happy to see Google build its railroad tracks over our tribal lands.

Even without the dodgy analogy, the project of digitising the information held in the world's printed books is too important to be dealt with purely as a commercial venture between rights holders and a potential supplier of services.

We are at an inflection point in world history, and the transition we are making from analogue to digital is happening so quickly and offers so many delights that there is a temptation to let the past moulder in archive boxes and concentrate solely on the new and digital.

For those who take that view then letting Google pay to digitise books is an uncontroversial decision, one that can deliver more digital stuff to search through without apparently costing anything.

George Santayana wrote 'those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it', but it may also be true that those who do not care to digitise their own past will end up paying a high price to regain what they give up so thoughtlessly.

If we let Google have its settlement we will all be the poorer. Not for a while, perhaps, but one day we will need more from this new library of Alexandria than Google is willing to offer, and find that the price it demands is more than we can pay.

Bill Thompson is an independent journalist and regular commentator on the BBC World Service programme Digital Planet.

Hamas condemns Holocaust lessons

Gaza's ruling Islamist movement Hamas has resisted suggestions that Palestinian children should be taught about the Holocaust in UN-run schools.

The head of its education committee in Gaza, Abdul Rahman el-Jamal, told the BBC that the Holocaust was a "big lie".

He said that to teach it would be to "grant a big favour" to Israel, which has been fighting Hamas for years.

The UN, which runs most Gazan schools, recently asked local groups whether the Holocaust should be taught.

It uses local textbooks and, in Gaza, that means using material from neighbouring Egypt, the BBC's Tim Franks reports.

But over the past seven years the UN has added its own coursework about human rights.

Mr Jamal told the BBC that the UN should, instead, teach about the Naqba, the term Palestinians use to describe the establishment of the state of Israel and the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees.

A spokesman for the UN said that no final decision on this year's curriculum had yet been made. Some 200,000 children are taught in schools run through the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

During the Holocaust, Nazi Germany murdered some six million Jews.

However, the event's significance is often disputed in parts of the Middle East where Israel is seen as the enemy and the Holocaust is seen as a tool used by Israel to justify its actions.

BBC News 

Pope calls for a "global authority" on economy

VATICAN CITY (Reuters) – Pope Benedict called on Tuesday for a "world political authority" to manage the global economy and for more government regulation of national economies to pull the world out of the current crisis and avoid a repeat.

The pope made his call for a re-think of the way the world economy was run in a new encyclical which touched on a number of social issues but whose main connecting thread was how the current crisis has affected both rich and poor nations.

Parts of the encyclical, titled "Charity in Truth," seemed bound to upset free marketers because of its underlying rejection of unbridled capitalism and unregulated market forces, which he said had led to "thoroughly destructive" abuse of the system and "grave deviations and failures."

An encyclical is the highest form of papal writing and gives the clearest indication to the world's 1.1 billion Catholics -- and to non-Catholics -- of what the pope and the Vatican think about specific social and moral issues.

The pope said every economic decision had a moral consequence and called for "forms of redistribution" of wealth overseen by governments to help those most affected by crises.

Benedict said "there is an urgent need of a true world political authority" whose task would be "to manage the global economy; to revive economies hit by the crisis; to avoid any deterioration of the present crisis and the greater imbalances that would result."

Such an authority would have to be "regulated by law" and "would need to be universally recognized and to be vested with the effective power to ensure security for all, regard for justice, and respect for rights."

"Obviously it would have to have the authority to ensure compliance with its decisions from all parties, and also with the coordinated measures adopted in various international forums," he said.

The United Nations, economic institutions and international finance all had to be reformed "even in the midst of a global recession," he said in the encyclical, a booklet of 141 pages.

The pope's call for a supranational body to tackle global economic woes disturbed some Catholic capitalists.

"There is a difference between coordination and mandate ... a reckless loan in the United States can and did impoverish people in Latvia. So obviously coordination is important as long as it is not mandates," said Frank Keating, CEO of the American Council of Life Insurers and former Governor of Oklahoma.

LOFTY MESSAGE

The encyclical was addressed to all Catholics and "all people of good will" and was released on the eve of the start of the G8 summit in Italy and three days before the pope is due to discuss the global downturn with U.S. President Barack Obama.

In several sections of the encyclical, Benedict made it clear he had great reservations about a totally free market.

"The conviction that the economy must be autonomous, that it must be shielded from 'influences' of a moral character, has led man to abuse the economic process in a thoroughly destructive way," he said.

"In the long term, these convictions have led to economic, social and political systems that trample upon personal and social freedom and are therefore unable to deliver the justice that they promise," he added.

Profit was useful only if it served as a means to a brighter future for all humanity.

"Once profit becomes the exclusive goal, if it is produced by improper means and without the common good as its ultimate end, it risks destroying wealth and creating poverty," he said.

He said the current economic crisis was "clear proof" of "pernicious effects of sin" in the economy.

"Financiers must rediscover the genuinely ethical foundation of their activity ...," he said.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who had rebuked the pope earlier this year at the height of the row over a Holocaust-denying bishop, welcomed the encyclical as important encouragement for world leaders ahead of a G8 meeting in Italy.

"Pope Benedict has encouraged the state leaders to create rules so that this sort of worldwide economic crisis isn't repeated," Merkel told reporters. "I also saw this as an order to work toward a social market economy in the world."

The pope appeared to back government intervention "in correcting errors and malfunctions" in the economy, saying "one could foresee an increase in the new forms of political participation, nationally and internationally."

(Additional reporting by Daniel Bases in New York and Sabine Siebold in Berlin; Editing by Matthew Jones)

Ira Einhorn, Earth Day's Dirty Secret

On this, the 39th anniversary of Earth Day, it is only fitting to speak of one of its founders, Ira Einhorn.

You won't find Ira Einhorn's name listed in any of the Earth Day promotional literature, as the organizers have taken great pains to distance themselves from this man, at least since he became better known for composting his girlfriend in a trunk in his closet for a couple of years in the late 1970s.

Earth Day organizers and publicists don't want to have anything to do with Ira these days. Since he was convicted of murder, he hasn't been very useful to them. But that wasn't always the case. In 1970, during the first Earth Day event, which was televized throughout the globe, Ira Einhorn was on stage as master of ceremonies.

Or so he claims, and it seems likely that he was.

A friend and contemporary of Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and acquaintance of authors Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Timothy Leary, Alvin Toffler, and Isaac Asimov, Einhorn held the floor for a half hour, during the first Earth Day celebration, in Philadelphia, kissing Edmund Muskie on the lips before surrendering the microphone to the Senator from Maine. There is no evidence that Muskie rejected his advances, or that anyone associated with the event had ever voiced any disagreement with Einhorn's place as a key organizer until after his arrest for the murder of Holly Maddux.

Ira Einhorn knew all of the right people. Executives from Sun Oil and AT&T showered him with support, financial and otherwise. Ira Einhorn was the man who could make Earth Day happen as, it seems, he did, denials notwithstanding.

Due in large part to his influence, Einhorn escaped punishment for his crime for a quarter of a century.

After bludgeoning his girlfriend of five years to death, fracturing her skull in a dozen places, Ira stuffed her body into a trunk, which he packed into a closet where it remained until discovered by the police nearly two years later.

When Holly Maddux disappeared in the fall of 1977, Einhorn was named as a suspect by the girl's parents, who knew that Einhorn had threatened their daughter with violence. Yet, after briefly questioning him, while the body of his murdered girlfriend lie decomposing in a trunk stored in a closet of his apartment, police accepted his denial of any knowledge of her whereabouts.

When she failed to reappear, the murdered girl's parents hired an investigator who very quickly came up with sufficient evidence for a warrant to search Einhorn's apartment. A downstairs neighbor told of a liquid leaking from Einhorn's apartment into the kitchen below, describing it as being dark in color and smelling of putrefaction. He also testified to hearing a scream, as well as "several sharp thuds", at the time of Holly's disappearance.

When the private investigator presented this evidence to the police, they finally obtained a search warrant, which was served on March 29, 1978.

The battered and partly mummified body of Holly Maddux was found in a trunk in a bedroom closet, packed in styrofoam, newspaper, and air fresheners.

Arrested, Einhorn's attorney was considering a run for the Senate. His name was Arlen Spector, of Pennsylvania. The darling of New Age society, politicians, Ivy League professors, and corporate executives alike, Einhorn had no shortage of friends during his bail hearing. With his great love for the earth, surely Ira would not have murdered anyone. Released on a mere $40,000 bail, of which he had to pay only ten percent, Einhorn fled to Sweden, remaining as a fugitive in Europe until 1997, when he was found living in France under another name.

While a fugitive, Einhorn was convicted in absentia in 1993, and sentenced to life in prison. The government of France, however, refused to extradite Einhorn unless the death penalty was taken off the table and he was promised a new trial. Eventually, this was agreed upon. Ira Einhorn, the founder of Earth Day, was once again convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison.

Today, we celebrate Earth Day, sacrosanct, proclaimed by none other than our Republican President George Bush, and every president since 1975, when President Ford first proclaimed and urged observance of Earth Day on the March equinox.

We're living in a time where wacky is in, and life doesn't mean very much.

While it is likely that Einhorn's violent history is not shared by other Earth Day founders, the observance is nevertheless bizarre.

Underlying the themes of Earth Day is a call for mankind to align itself with nature, and against itself, enlisting human beings to take part in a battle that seeks to place humanity under the control of an enlightened elite, one that values the interests of nature above that of people.

The process of our destruction is termed sustainable development, a destructive scheme that is in direct opposition to Christianity, which holds that man is to have dominion over nature, which is given to us for our use.

Ira Einhorn took the life of one woman, while the movement that he had a hand in founding seeks to steal the life from all of us.

Vatican officials object to Iranian president's remarks on Israel

By John Thavis
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The Vatican has criticized Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's remarks about Israel at a U.N. conference on racism as "extremist and unacceptable" and said the comments promote an atmosphere of conflict.

At the same time, Vatican officials, including Pope Benedict XVI, emphasized the importance of participation in the conference, which was being boycotted by the United States and several other Western countries.

Ahmadinejad told conference participants in Geneva April 20 that Israel had "resorted to military aggression to make an entire nation homeless under the pretext of Jewish suffering" and had established a "totally racist government in the occupied Palestine." His comments prompted a temporary walkout by dozens of diplomats in attendance.

The Vatican spokesman, Jesuit Father Federico Lombardi, told Vatican Radio April 20 that "statements like those of the Iranian president do not go in the right direction, because even if he did not deny the Holocaust or the right of Israel to exist, he expressed extremist and unacceptable positions."

"For this reason it is important to continue to affirm with clarity the respect for human dignity against every form of racism or intolerance. We hope the conference can still serve this purpose," Father Lombardi said.

The following day, the Vatican spokesman issued a broader statement, saying that "the Holy See deplores the use of this United Nations forum for the adoption of political positions of an extremist and offensive nature against any state."

"This does not contribute to dialogue and it provokes an unacceptable atmosphere of conflict," it said.

Father Lombardi said the conference was an important opportunity to take new steps toward "effectively combating the racism and intolerance that still today affect children, women, those of African descent, migrants and indigenous peoples ... in every part of the world."

Archbishop Silvano Tomasi, the chief Vatican representative to U.N. agencies in Geneva, told Catholic News Service by telephone April 20 that, although the Vatican objected to the Iranian president's remarks about Israel, Vatican delegation members did not think walking out was the right response.

Archbishop Tomasi said it was important for people not to be distracted by the remarks of the Iranian president. Much more significant than Ahmadinejad's speech, he said, were the real advances made in the draft conference document, which recognizes the Holocaust as something not to be forgotten and condemns anti-Semitism as well as intolerance against other religions.

The archbishop said it was also essential for the international community to give attention to the new forms of racism and discrimination that are emerging, especially against immigrants, the indigenous and the economically marginalized.

On April 19, Pope Benedict underlined the importance of the international conference and urged participants to take concrete steps to combat discrimination and intolerance around the world.

The pope, speaking at a noon blessing at his villa outside Rome, said the conference was important because, despite the lessons of history, racist attitudes and actions are still present in contemporary society.

He encouraged participants to take "firm and concrete action, at the national and international levels, to prevent and eliminate every form of racism and intolerance." Above all, he said, a vast educational effort is needed so that human dignity and fundamental human rights are better understood and respected.

"For its part, the church teaches that only recognition of the dignity of man, created in the image and likeness of God, is able to constitute a sure reference point in this commitment," he said.

"I sincerely encourage all delegates present at the Geneva conference to work together in a spirit of mutual dialogue and acceptance in order to put an end to every form of racism, discrimination and intolerance," he said.

The Geneva conference was convened to examine a statement adopted in 2001 at the U.N.'s first conference on racism held in Durban, South Africa. The United States and Israel left the 2001 conference when some Arab representatives argued that Zionism was equivalent to racism.

The conference in Geneva was being boycotted by the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and several European governments because of fears that it would again provide a platform to critics of Israel. U.N. officials have pointed out that the text under consideration in Geneva has been revised in recent months, and the latest draft does not include references to Israel or Zionism.

Father Lombardi said the draft document being examined was "acceptable, since the main elements that prompted objections have been removed."

But in a statement released April 18, the U.S. State Department said the draft text still "singles out one particular conflict and prejudges key issues that can only be resolved in negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians."

The statement said the United States also has serious concerns with relatively new additions to the text regarding "incitement" to religious hatred that run counter to the U.S. commitment to unfettered free speech. Unfortunately, the U.S. statement said, it appeared that those concerns would not be addressed at the Geneva conference.

Some Muslim countries have pressed for a ban on language considered insulting to Islam.

END