Jeff Roberts

Where does this stop? Courts in Europe have been forcing Google to scrub embarrassing search results, and now one in Canada has made an even broader ruling: it ordered the search engine to delete websites not only from the Canadian version of Google, but across the world as well.

The decision is part of an alarming trend of disappearing online information. The Canadian decision, in case you missed it, is about a company that is trying to stop a rival from selling network devices that it claims are the fruit of its stolen trade secrets. As part of its lawsuit, the company wants Google to remove all search results that link to the rival’s more than 300 websites.

In response, the Supreme Court of British Columbia has issued a sweeping temporary injunction. The injunction matters because it will have a global effect; in less than 14 days, people in Canada will be no longer be able to find the websites in Google, and neither will Google users in other countries.

A federal appeals court ruled that the HathiTrust, a searchable collection of digital books controlled by university libraries, does not violate copyright, and that the libraries can continue to make copies for digitally-impaired readers.

The decision is a setback for the Authors Guild and for other groups of copyright holders who joined the lawsuit to shut down the HathiTrust’s operations. By contrast, it is a victory for many scholars and librarians who regard the database as an invaluable repository of knowledge.

More broadly, the appeals court decision is the latest in a series of rulings about how copyright law should apply to digital versions of the tens of millions of library books scanned by Google.

The unanimous ruling by three judges of the US Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a 2012 decision that preceded the 2013 landmark ruling that declared that Google’s Book scanning project was fair use and had “many benefits.”

People can be surprised to discover that they don’t actually own the digital books and songs they buy, but that they instead rent them from large companies like Amazon and Apple. In response, Congress is asking whether copyright law should be changed to ensure people can resell or lend out their digital goods.

The House Judiciary Committee is scheduled to heard testimony from publishing and technology executives as well as public interest groups over whether the government needs to update a long-standing rule known as “first sale” that lets people do what they want with works they lawfully purchased.

The short answer, based on the upcoming hearing, appears to be no as members of Congress and those testifying appeared skeptical that people should have the same property rights in digital goods as they do in physical ones. But some suggested that it might be time for companies to do a better job of explaining to consumers about what they are allowed to do with the books and music they “buy.”

The House Judiciary Committee, which is in the process of reviewing US copyright law, held a field hearing in New York on June 2 to get the views of publisher John Wiley, the New York Public Library, and tech CEO John Ossenmacher among others as to whether Congress should require a digital resale right. For practical purposes, a change in the law could mean giving consumers the right to sell their iTunes library, or to lend e-books bought on Barnes & Noble to a friend.

The mood at the committee hearing, chaired by Rep Bob Goodlatte (R-VA), was skeptical, however. Several of the witnesses pointed out that requiring first sale for digital media, which is so easy to exchange and reproduce, would likely bring major harm to the primary market for books and music. Others noted that second hand digital files don’t really become “used” or become deteriorated like books and records.

[Commentary] A major assault on the past is underway in Europe where tens of thousands are seizing on a landmark court ruling to demand Google remove search results they dislike.

As a result, people on opposite sides of the Atlantic, and even within Europe, could soon see very different versions of the Internet as Google’s listings become riddled with blank spaces where information once stood. This is dangerous.

Europe’s past is replete with governments that scrubbed history to suit their own ends. The new Google rules could not only provide a new way for the powerful to purge the past, but also help legitimize censorship in other countries.

This doesn’t mean that there is no place for forgetting or deleting data -- indeed, history also shows that forgetting can be as important to a society as remembering. But the removal rules, as they are now constructed, threaten to do more harm than good.

Pandora and Sirius XM already pay far more in copyright royalties than AM/FM stations, but that’s not stopping the music industry from demanding that Congress force the digital radio services to pay even more.

SoundExchange, a royalty collection service, announced a heart-tugging campaign called “Project 72.” The campaign is to back the “RESPECT Act,” a law proposed by Reps George Holding (R-NC) and John Conyers (D-MI) that would require digital radio services to pay performance royalties for pre-1972 recordings.

As it stands, Sirius and Pandora don’t pay to perform these early recordings since they are not covered by federal copyright law. The industry claims the issue is one of fairness, arguing that the earlier recordings deserve the same protection as the later ones. Sounds fair, right? After all, what sort of philistine wouldn’t pay those dear old musicians for their oldies?

Alas, it’s not that simple. As I’ve explained before, the vagaries of copyright law mean that Pandora doesn’t pay for pre-1972 recordings -- but neither does any other radio service. What’s more, the digital services are paying large sums to play post-’72 performance rights, while AM/FM stations (which are much richer) pay nothing at all. And, in any case, everyone must pay the songwriters and publishers for the pre-1972 works.

All the RESPECT Act would do is exacerbate these irrational distinctions between traditional and digital radio services (and possibly put Pandora and Sirius XM out of business altogether), while failing to solve the music industry’s deeper problem, which is the permanent decline of CD sales.

Public Knowledge’s Jodie Griffin said, “Public Knowledge supports protecting pre-1972 sound recordings under federal copyright law, but this bill fails to give pre-1972 recordings actual copyright protection and fails to solve the uncertainty created by a patchwork of state laws. Pre-1972 sound recordings should be addressed in a comprehensive approach that considers the many current issues in music licensing. Pre-1972 sound recordings should be given actual copyright protection that lasts for the lifetime of the author. That protections should be balanced by limitations like robust statutory licensing, mechanisms to help users locate authors, and reasonable damages. Additionally, users that are currently relying on limitations in state laws today should be given notice and time to adjust to the new regime. Finally, the windfall that results from new licensing requirements should go the actual artist, so the statutory splits that often currently give half of the collected royalty payments to record labels should be adjusted to increase artists' share of the royalties.”

[Commentary] The Justice Department filed its response to Apple’s appeal of a 2013 price-fixing verdict that found the iPhone maker had brokered a conspiracy among book publishers to fix the price of e-books.

The government brief is 117 pages long and recounts familiar allegations: that Apple helped big publishers create a new pricing scheme in 2012 in order to get books on its new iPad device, and to wrest the e-book market from Amazon.

The new brief contains rhetorical flourishes such as “publishers fear and loathe $9.99 E-book pricing,” and also makes the unlikely assertion that Apple organized the conspiracy because it “cared about iBookstore profits” and about earning a 30 percent commission (unlikely since e-book revenues are chickenfeed to a company that sells hundreds of millions of iPhones).

The most interesting part of the brief, however, may be the Justice Department’s descriptions of Amazon. Even though Amazon is cast as one of the victims of the conspiracy, the brief reveals the immense power the retail giant held over the publishing world in 2011.

This begs the question of why the Justice Department continues to train all of its antitrust fire on Apple, which continues to be an also-ran in the e-book market with a market share reportedly around 10 percent for most publishers. Why not investigate Amazon instead? Section 2 of the Sherman Act holds that a company violates antitrust law if it has monopoly power and uses that power in improper ways.

Someone claiming to be an ex-Google employee suggested in April that the company conspires to steal revenues from its partners who host Google-provided ads on their websites.

Now, a prominent Seattle-based lawyer who used to work for Microsoft is using those accusations as the basis for a nationwide class action lawsuit against Google. A company called Re-Post filed a class action complaint in San Francisco on behalf of other websites that are allegedly getting shortchanged by Google.

The complaint suggests this is part of a pattern: Google conspires to cheat those who use its AdSense program, which lets websites host ads provided by Google and share in the profits. Under the alleged scheme, Google waits until a few days before an AdSense partner is due to receive a quarterly pay-out, and then cites a policy violation in order to terminate their account. Terminating an account in this way lets Google keep all the money.

Critics of Google can find plenty to gnash their teeth about: from its repeated privacy flubs to its illegal pharma ads to its growing influence in Washington.

But a lawsuit claiming that Google is blatantly cheating and shutting down its AdSense partners, which contribute a good part of Google’s revenue, just doesn’t make much sense. Rather, this new lawsuit over ads, along with another improbable class action filed against Google in April, suggests that someone is running what amounts to a legal smear campaign.

Apple and Google declared a dramatic peace in their global battle over smartphone patents, but there’s little indication the pact will end legal hostilities between Apple and its Korean rival, Samsung. Instead, the two companies traded insults in a new court filing that was supposed to describe their efforts to settle a long-running patent case in California.

In the filing, Apple complains that Samsung’s head lawyer, John Quinn, described the iPhone maker as a “jihadist” to the media, and that Quinn had also described the patent case as “Apple’s Vietnam.” Apple also points to a new Vanity Fair article that claims Samsung systemically filches others’ intellectual property part of its business model. Samsung, meanwhile, claims in the filing that Apple is demanding improper concessions before settlement talks even begin -- specifically, that Apple insists that Samsung not bring up the talks in unrelated legal proceedings.

“Only Apple,” says Samsung, “seeks to impose an obstacle to this resolution through a unilateral condition precedent to further [Alternative Dispute Resolution].”

A federal judge in Silicon Valley took the unusual step of rejecting a routine e-mail search request, and suggested that Google and the government take steps to halt the now-routine practice in which tech companies hand over the entirety of their customer’s cloud-based computer accounts.

“The Technorati are … everywhere,” wrote US Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal. “And yet too few understand, or even suspect, the essential role played by many of these workers and their employers in facilitating most government access to private citizen’s data.”

The words introduced a six-page decision in which Judge Grewal refused to issue an order that would have forced Google to hand over the email account of a government employee suspected of corruption. Judge Grewal ordered the details of the investigation, including the name of the suspect, to be redacted but stated that the refusal order should be published.

Judge Grewal’s unusual order is also the latest flare-up in what the Washington Post styled the “Magistrate’s rebellion,” in which federal judges in multiple states have begun to balk about the scope of the search warrants that law enforcement agencies routinely demand.

[Commentary] In the case of the Internet, the most effective response to repressions will occur beyond the realm of governments. This is true on the level of technical protocols, where privacy tools like TOR developed by nonprofit groups working across states, are helping people access the Internet free of surveillance.

Many of the most promising political tools are, perhaps surprisingly, coming from the legal and policy departments of technology companies like Google and Twitter. The so-called “Transparency Reports” they issue serve as flares to warn where and how governments are suppressing the Internet, and the legal challenges they are deploying in Turkey are serving to slow, if not check, censorship activities.

Meanwhile, civil society groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation are also active in distributing privacy tools, and in energizing online populations around the world to stand up for free Internet communication and to talk to each other across national boundaries.

Finally, the media -- in all its forms -- will have an essential role in ensuring the political protocol of the Internet stays open and free. The very act of reporting, by a giant TV company or a brave single blogger, reinforces the idea that speech and discussion is not limited to national boundaries and that the Internet belongs to people, not governments.