Google Public Policy Blog: April 2009

Endorsing a path towards a "meaningful use" definition

Thursday, April 30, 2009

Posted by Alfred Spector, Vice President of Engineering, and Missy Krasner, Product Marketing ManagerMarkle Foundation'sMeaningful Use and CertificationU.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)Google HealthendorsedCommon Framework for Networked Personal Health Information

Live Stream on YouTube: The President's First 100 Days News Conference

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Posted by Steve Grove, YouTube News & Politics(Cross-posted from the YouTube Blog)White House YouTube channel

Hear Karl Rovea re-cap talk with AmericansCitizentube videoyoutube.com/whitehouse

Experimental Flu Trends for Mexico

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Posted by Jeremy Ginsberg and Matt Mohebbi, Software Engineers(Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog)Google Flu TrendsExperimental Flu Trends for MexicoCDC's swine flu site

Google Book Search settlement will expand access

Wednesday, April 29, 2009

Posted by Adam Smith, Director of Product Management, Book SearchGoogle Book Search settlementsettlement Notice websiteLibrary Project

When you find the book you're searching for, you’ll be able to preview 20% of the book over the Internet from anywhere in the U.S. If you want to look at the whole thing, you'll be able to go down to your public library where there will be a computer station with access to the whole book for free. And if you don’t want to leave home or want a copy for yourself, you’ll be able to purchase access to an electronic copy of the book. As always, if the book is old enough to be in the public domain, you’ll be able to download the whole book for free.

If you’re at a university, in addition to your libraries' free access points, your school can obtain an institutional subscription that gives you access to most books that we've scanned. And scholars and students who don’t keep the same study hours as the library will be able to look at any book, anywhere, any time.

If you are vision impaired, the settlement will open a world of books to which you've never had access. Visually impaired people will be able to search for books through the Google Books interface and purchase, borrow, or read at a public library any of the books that are available to the general public in a format that is accessible to the vision impaired.

If you want to read in foreign languages, you will have access to tens of thousands of more books than you have today. Books in Spanish add up to almost 10% of the books already scanned. If you account for the difference in numbers between books in Spanish and English, the usage per book in Spanish is more than three times what it is for books in English.

Extending notice on the Google Book Search settlement

Monday, April 27, 2009

Posted by Alexander Macgillivray, Associate General Counsel for Products and Intellectual Propertyannouncedsettlement agreementNew York Timesreportedwebsite for authors and publishersWriter's DigestUSA TodayUpdate as of 04/28/09

Aneesh Chopra as Chief Technology Officer

Saturday, April 18, 2009

Posted by Alan Davidson, Director of Government Relations and Public PolicyappointmentsaidVivek Kundra

Discussion Tuesday on the Google Book Search settlement

Friday, April 17, 2009

Posted by Adam Kovacevich, Senior Manager, Global Communications & Public Affairsannounced
For those in D.C. who are interested in learning about the settlement -- and hearing the answers to those questions -- I encourage you to check out a discussion next Tuesday hosted by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation:Copyright, Content and Class Action Lawsuits:
A Debate on the Google Book Search Settlement
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
Time: 2:00 PM – 3:30 PM
Place: The Library of Congress, Thomas Jefferson Building,
Room LJ 162, Washington, DC
RSVP and more informationUPDATE (4/22):

Some questions related to Google News and the Associated Press

Tuesday, April 7, 2009

Posted by Alexander Macgillivray, Associate General Counsel for Products and Intellectual Property Yesterday I entered the following search in Google News: [Phish in mountain view]. The search results led me to click on this headline, which took me to the full story by the San Jose Mercury News about Phish's upcoming concert at Shoreline Amphitheatre.
Users like me are sent from different Google sites to newspaper websites at a rate of more than a billion clicks per month. These clicks go to news publishers large and small, domestic and international -- day and night.
And once a reader is on the newspaper's site, we work hard to help them earn revenue. Our AdSense program pays out millions of dollars to newspapers that place ads on their sites, and our goal is that our interest-based advertising technology will help newspapers make more from each click we send them by serving better, more relevant ads to their readers to generate higher returns.
The Associated Press (AP) recently issued a press release announcing plans to develop an initiative to "protect" the newspaper industry's content online. Since then, some readers, users and journalists have asked us if the AP's plan is about Google since we host complete AP articles. The answer is that it doesn't appear to pertain to Google since we host those articles in partnership with the AP. We announced that partnership in 2007 as part of an experiment in hosting articles on our site. In hosting agreements such as this, we pay news agencies and display the entire text of articles, such as this one from the AP about President Obama's visit to Turkey.

We drive traffic and provide advertising in support of all business models -- whether news sources choose to host their articles with us or on their own sites, and whether their business model is ad-supported or based on subscriptions. In all cases, for news articles we've crawled and indexed but do not host, we show users just enough to make them want to read more -- the headline, a "snippet" of a line or two of text and a link back to to the news publisher's website.
In the U.S., the doctrine of fair use enshrined in the US Copyright Act allows us to show snippets and links. The fair use doctrine protects transformative uses of content, such as indexing to make it easier to find [pdf]. Even though the Copyright Act does not grant a copyright owner a veto over such uses, it is our policy to allow any rightsholder, in this case newspaper or wire service, to remove their content from our index -- all they have to do is ask us or implement simple technical standards such as robots.txt or metatags.
As for Phish in Mountain View this summer, asking will get you nowhere because the tickets are already sold out.

India's 15th general election: tools for citizen empowerment

Monday, April 6, 2009

Posted by Rishi Jaitly, Senior Policy Analyst, and Sanjay Jain, Product Manager(Cross-posted from the Google India Blog)largest democratic eventToday, along with a wide range of partners, we are happy to announce the launch of the Google India Elections Centre - available in English and in Hindi.
People from across India can use the centre to do the following:

Confirm their voter registration status

Discover their polling location

View their constituency on a map

Consume relevant election-related news, blogs, videos, and quotations

Evaluate the status of development in their constituency across a range of indicators

Learn about the background of their Member of Parliament and this year's candidates

the Association for Democratic ReformsHT Media LimitedIndicus AnalyticsJanaagraha Centre for Citizenship and Democracythe Liberty InstitutePRS Legislative Servicessite

Tracking federal spending on Google Maps

Thursday, April 2, 2009

Posted by Dan Martin, Global Communications and Public AffairsTARP Capital Purchase ProgramAmerican Recovery and Reinvestment ActTreasury DepartmentView FinancialStability.gov - Transaction Data in a larger mapDoris MatsuiView Larger MapTom JonesView Larger MapLabor, Health, and Human ServicesEnergy and WaterCommerce, Justice, and Science

Canadians: have your voice heard on Internet traffic management

Wednesday, April 1, 2009

Posted by Jacob Glick, Canada Policy Counselstudy Internet traffic management practicesGoogle and a coalitionweighed into this proceedingmany formal submissionsonline public consultationLog in to online consultation

Public Policy Blog

Endorsing a path towards a "meaningful use" definition

Live Stream on YouTube: The President's First 100 Days News Conference

Experimental Flu Trends for Mexico

Google Book Search settlement will expand access

Extending notice on the Google Book Search settlement

Aneesh Chopra as Chief Technology Officer

Discussion Tuesday on the Google Book Search settlement

Some questions related to Google News and the Associated Press

India's 15th general election: tools for citizen empowerment

Tracking federal spending on Google Maps

Canadians: have your voice heard on Internet traffic management

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