China Plans To Scan Text Messages For Unhealthy Content... Five Years After Announcing The Same Thing

from the it's-winter-reruns-everyone... dept

Apparently, it's time for reruns. The NY Times is reporting that China is now planning to start scanning text messages for "unhealthy content," which is defined as including any of various (secret) keywords supplied by the police. Now, given the recent ramp up in attention paid to China's censorship efforts, this might be interesting... if it hadn't been announced five years ago. This is what the NY Times wants us to pay for? I guess if they block off their content behind a paywall, no one would be able to search the archives of the NY Times to find out that that great paper had covered the story five years ago itself (though, a couple months after we wrote about it).

Filed Under: china, paywalls, reporting, scanning, text messages

Sarkozy To Throw Another Billion At Digitizing Books

from the and-he-could-have-let-Google-do-it-for-free... dept

As a few folks sent in, Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged to spend approximately $1.1 billion scanning books. Does this sound familiar? It should. Five years ago, French officials freaked out about Google scanning all those books, and declared they were going to spend $2.5 billion on its own project, called Quaero. And what happened? Well, it turned into a huge boondoggle with a bunch of companies claiming the money, but nothing of substance ever coming from the project, which has now been mostly abandoned.

So, now we've got Sarkozy -- defender and mass infringer of copyrights -- who recently warned that Google's book scanning project was somehow a threat to French culture. So, now he's going to spend $1.1 billion more on a project that we hope will be at least marginally more well defined than Quaero. In the meantime, France's national library is apparently all set to have Google scan its collection of books. Seems easier. In fact, the report notes that the $1.1 billion will go to private companies to scan books, and it's entirely possible that Google could be one of those companies. After all, it's pretty good at book scanning.

Filed Under: books, france, nicolas sarkozy, scanning

Weird Priorities: Europeans Want To Digitize Books As Quickly As Possible... Just As Long As It's Not Google Doing It

from the yeah-that-makes-sense dept

Sometimes you just shake your head and wonder what people are thinking. Just as German Chancellor Angela Merkel came out against the Google Book settlement, European Commission Information society and media commissioner Viviane Reding declared that Europe needs to speed up digitizing books. Except if Google is doing it. Why? Well, as Copycense points out, it seems that some Europeans are trotting out the moral rights issue. Moral rights on copyright are not accepted under US copyright law, but are standard in Europe. But, again, this seems to show the problems of bringing morality into copyright law. Europe wants to get books digitized. The fastest way to do that is to let Google keep doing what it's doing (and feel free to do separate digitization projects as well -- but Google has a nice headstart). So, how is it "moral" to keep more books offline and unsearchable? According to German academic Roland Reuss in that Publishers Weekly story above about moral rights, "academics have gotten by just fine for the past 500 years under the old system of publishing." Yes, and people were fine having to walk everywhere or ride horses before cars came along too. Who knew progress was immoral? Ned Ludd is alive and well apparently.

Filed Under: books, europe, scanning
Companies: google