Google Books project face trouble in India

A group of Indian author and publishers have raised voice against Google and filed charges at the New York district court alleging copyright violation for scanning several books in Indian languages without notifying the authors.

Star Publications Pvt. Ltd., Abhinav Publications, Daya Publication House and Pustak Mahal also include in the group of publishers, who have moved court against the Google Book Settlement.

By reaching an agreement with several universities in the US, Google has been scanning millions of books under copyright protection since 2004 and thus the snippets of these books were made available online under the initiative, known as the Google Library Project.

Siddharth Arya, the legal counsel for IRRO (Indian Reprographic Rights Organisation) said, “Google’s unilateral conduct is a brazen attempt to turn copyright law on its head, by usurping the exclusive rights of the copyright holder”.

“The outcome of all of this was GBS 2.0 that incorporates minor cosmetic changes but continues to violate basic copyright laws. It retains several fundamental issues in the original settlement such as a mechanism known as ‘opt out’,” Arya said.

Popularity: 28% [?]

Google adds date and time specific searches

Google has added new tools to its ’show options’ link which nestles at the top of the search results page.

Nine new options range from date and time specific searches, to filters for shopping web sites.

“Today we’re announcing nine new Search Options tools: past hour, specific date range, more shopping sites, fewer shopping sites, visited pages, not yet visited, books, blogs and news,” explained Google product manager Nundu Janakiram in a blog post.

“These features have been rolling out gradually and will be available globally in English by the end of the day. You can try them yourself by searching Google and clicking ‘Show options’ in the blue bar just under the logo.”

Google added search results from forum and discussion posts earlier this week, and has now added the option to search within its Books, Blogs, and News pages. This will make the business of performing research quicker, easier and more accurate, the firm said.

The new time and date options let users search for the most recent posts, or any results found within a specific date range, both of which Google claims will be useful for people working on research projects.

The ‘visited pages’ feature can filter out results from a user’s visited sites, while adding the option to search only for sites that have not been visited before, giving users the chance to find some previously missed, but relevant pages. The feature requires a Google Account and the web history option enabled.

Popularity: 12% [?]