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What’s the point of Google’s new FastFlip reader? Not to change the way you read news on the Web — it’s too ugly and simplistic for that. But because it loads pages very fast — and requires minimal effort to navigate — it could be useful for portable devices. Specifically, tablet-like gadgets with 3G modems [...]

Google just announced that it has acquired reCAPTCHA, one of the leading providers of CPATCHAs, the hard-to-read puzzles you often have to solve before you can sign up for a new web service. Google, of course, isn’t so much interested in owning software that can generate CAPTCHAs – that’s an easy problem to solve – [...]

Google has acquired reCAPTCHA, an open source technology that provides CAPTCHAs to prevent spam and fraud. Captchas are those security questions you find on Web sites that require you to decipher and type words or numbers and detects whether the user is a human… Tweet This Post

Add another name to the list of opponents of the Google Book Search Settlement: Marybeth Peters, U.S. Register of Copyrights. In testimony before the House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Thursday, Peters tarred the deal as “fundamentally at odds with the law” and villainized Google, saying the company is making a “mockery” of the copyright protections [...]

When the US Copyright Office first heard about the proposed Google Books settlement, it found the idea a “positive development.” Then, after reading the fine print, it changed its collective mind, deciding instead that Google was really out to rewrite US copyright law through the courts. Marybeth Peters, the Register of Copyrights, today explained to [...]

Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has now agreed to let any book retailer resell access to the out-of-print books it is putting online via its Google Books search engine. But the offer does not seem to have appeased the company’s critics, who contend that Google will still wield too much control over the book industry—and particularly over [...]

SAN FRANCISCO — After a flurry of last-minute filings on Tuesday, a federal judge must now begin untangling the mountain of competing claims about how a legal settlement granting Google the right to create the world’s largest digital library and bookstore would affect competition, authors’ rights and readers’ privacy… Tweet This Post

BRUSSELS, Sept 7 (Reuters) – The French government plans to file its objections to Google Inc’s (GOOG.O) plan to digitize millions of books in a New York court this week, a French Culture Ministry official said on Monday. “France will send its observations to the U.S. court today or tomorrow,” Nicolas Georges, director for books [...]

First Germany, now France. Nicolas Sarkozy’s government has written to a US court urging it to stop a $125 million settlement between Google (NSDQ: GOOG) and US book publishers, warning that Google will have unfair control over European works and a “monopoly (on) digitising European orphan works without permission” (via Reuters)… Tweet This Post