The US Federal Trade Commission is looking to take anti-trust action against Google,  because there is belief that Google has abused its dominance of the search business.

The FTC is nearing a decision after 16 month of long investigation into Google’s search and advertising businesses, and sources say things are not looking good for the Mountain View–based company. The final decision will probably arrive next November or, at least, December.

Reuters reports that four of the five FTC commissioners are “convinced” that “Big G” abused its dominant position in the web search market to stifle its competition. Only one
commissioner remains “skeptical”.

For its part, Google, with its Chairman Eric Shmidt, has consistently denied any wrongdoing.

More specifically, The FTC is investigating on how Google act in the online travel industry, where it seems to be done that Google damaged competitors as Nextag or Yalp, positioning them in a bad quality ranking.

If the FTC will confirm that “Big G” has abused its market position, the search giant will be left with only two real choices: it can strive to reach a settlement, as it did with the European Commission, or it can prepare itself for a long and contentious legal battle.
Either option is sure to be costly.

We remind that a similar investigation was launched by the European Commission in 2010.

back to Europe, the attention seems to be focused on privacy.

European privacy regulators have found flaws in Google’s revised privacy policy, which may breach EU data protection laws.

A majority of the European data and privacy regulators have signed and sent a joint letter to the California-based search giant asking the firm to make changes to its revised policy. 24 of the 27 member states’ data protection regulators signed the letter, with the exception of Greece, Romania and Lithuania.

The regulators have asked Google to explain the firm’s intentions and detail methods for sharing user data across its services. The letter also said that Google must seek “explicit consent” when combining users’ data together.

We will back soon on this “delicate” issue.

Few days ago, The lawyer Simone Aliprandi published the results of his survey, done in 2011 for his PhD thesis, titled “Copyright in the digital age. An empirical research about behaviours, social perceptions and level of awareness between internet users”. The
main tool used for this research study was an online questionnaire based on the CAWI (Computer Assisted Web Interviewing) method.

The questionnaire was posted both in Italian and English version on the open source platform Limesurvey and remained available online for 4 months without any filter or limitations (from February 1 to June 1, 2011).

The survey is divided in two section: the first one is dedicated to Italy, and the second one to the rest of the world. Aliprandi interviewed about 1,800 people (1,300 for Italy and 500 for the rest of the world). More than anything else, the main pourpose of Aliprandi was to explore how copyright can be analyzed from a sociological point of view. This, as Aliprandi said, can be considered a sort of a “pilot research”.

Therefore, this study address three broader research fields:

• most common behaviors of Internet users when they get, distribute, or otherwise deal with online content under copyright;
• the average perception of Internet users about copyright itself, that is, whether they see it as a primary or minor problem, a useful tool or a useless burden, etc.;
• the level of awareness of Internet users about mechanisms and principles currently governing copyright law, in order to expose their actual level of knowledge on related issues.

We would like to remind that Aliprandi chose to use open content licenses, both on the web and in open access journals.

Today we decided to analize the Italian part of the study, whose results gives interesting “food for thought”.

We would like to underline that the main part of the “respondents” are in the target 18-44 with a medium-high level of education (80%).

First of all we can say that emerges clearly the perception’s deficit still present in our Country about the copyright’s protection. Those who illegally download didn’t perceive
a sense of guilty for that action. The illegal downloading of programs, creative contents, music files is not perceived like stealing a cd, dvd or even a book from a store. Even if many of them knows that downloading file in that way is illegal, they already know that is generally accepted / acceptable. We can conclude that the main problem is the “social perception”, even because the great part of the repondents believe that the illegal download damages the companies that produce and sell the work, and not the entire creative and social-economic system.

For more information http://copyrightsurvey.blogspot.it/

At the end of September, the Court of Cassation, the Supreme French Court, issued
two important rulings on the subject of Copyright Protection Online.

These judgments involved two separate aspects of the ongoing fight against
illegal publication of intellectual property online.

- In the first case, the Supreme French Court ruled that, when a report has already been made against an illegal content uploaded online (and the consequent removal procedure has been throughly carried out), the host provider (in this case Google / Youtube) can not be held responsible if the content in question is again uploaded on its servers, but it is up to the copyright owner to report the presence of such content and ask again for its removal; in this case, the Court overturruled what had been held by the Court of Appeal, which had held that a single notice was sufficient against a specific content, but doing so indirectly called into question a surveillance obligation, seemingly
imposing Google to prevent a specific video (which had been already removed) from being uploaded again on Youtube.

- In the second case, Google was considered responsible for not having removed from its keyword list (meaning the words which are automatically “suggested” while typing a websearch), some terms that would facilitate the users in finding pirated material online (eg.: torrent, megaupload, rapidshare, and similar); in this case, the Court, reversing
the conclusions issued by previous judges, ruled that “the electronic communications service offered to the public by Google systematically guides internet users, by means of specific keyword suggestions, towards websites that contain recordings made available to the public without the permission of the respective artists / authors / performers or record labels, thus facilitating the infringement of copyright”.

The first of the judgments above seems in line with the most recent ones observed at European level, confirming that, even for French Courts, the host provider acts as mere conduit, and does not seem to have any obligation to oversee what its users post online, as long as it promptly acts for speedy removal, once asked to do so by the rightholders.

As for the second ruling, the most obvious point is that, in spite of the declarations made a few months ago, Google still does not seem to have cleaned up its autocomplete function from words which encourage and/or facilitate searching for pirated material online.