Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Google. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Google Chromebook - History repeats itself!

Google Chrome IconImage via Wikipedia
Google Chrome Logo
I never cease to be amazed at how technology often circles back on itself. When distributed computing first b
egan, clients used a terminal with no hard drive. All applications ran on the central mainframe and IT departments were the only ones that had to install applications, worry about hackers and viruses were not even invented yet. Now we have the "new" Chromebook which is essentially a terminal with no hard drive to access applications, documents, etc from "the cloud". The more things change the more things stay the same (or revert back to the same!)

The problem with such devices is that you need to have total faith in your service provider - in this case Google. It puts us back in the situation of having a commercial enterprise that, if used by huge numbers of people, becomes too big to fail. Google would also be in the position to offer the service for free to get it rolling then when the amount of critical data reaches a certain point they could change their policies and begin charging more and more - much like the cell phone companies do now and their users would essentially be held hostage to whatever revenue scheme Google (or another cloud service company) would impose.

Another issue is that these new "dumb" laptops could not be used for anything but a door stop if you live or travel into a geographic area that has no internet connection - I mean NO connection - Wifi or cell.  Yes, there are actually large areas, at least out here in the West, that have huge dead zones!  Although I live less than five miles from the center of a city right on Interstate 5, I cannot get a reliable cell signal in my living room - really frustrating since I'd like to give up my land line.  The construction of cell towers has pretty much followed the main interstate freeways and in states with extended rural areas like my native Oregon there are huge expanses within the state where your cell gets no bars at all.

Also, I doubt if Google's rivals would want to provide a service that can be accessed by someone else's hardware device so we get back to the iPad vs. Google Android marketplace issues again.
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Tuesday, February 22, 2011

IE 9 RC still not ready for prime time but Google Chrome is a blast!

Well, I installed the new Internet Explorer 9 release client and, although I loved the "pinning to the taskbar" capability, the ability to designate an entire list of pages to open as default pages and the clean interface that lets you see so much more of each web page you are browsing, I ran into some significant problems using it on my new 64-bit Windows 7 workstation.

ZemantaImage via WikipediaFirst, I tried to install Zemanta, a blogging assistant extension, for use with my Blogger accounts under this new browser and, even though Zemanta said it was installed, when I opened one of my Blogs to begin editing, the Z
emanta extension interface would not open.  I tried reinstalling, made sure I had "allowed" Zemanta to make changes on my computer, etc. but no joy.

Then I was up on Amazon looking at the new educational game "Roman Town".  I added it to my cart, went through logging in to my account and setting the shipping address but when it came to loading the screen where I would select my payment options, I got nothing but a white screen with a location bar at the top.  I retried the purchase several times but finally had to give up and use a different browser to complete the transaction.

Next I was reading my Google news alerts and went to "share" an article I had read on one of the web pages I pulled up to read and when IE 9 tried to open the Twitter interface I again got a plain white screen with just a URL and my Twitter icon.  Obviously, it recognized that I was already logged in to Twitter but could not draw up my status page.  Again, multiple attempts to successfully tweet from the web page failed.  I ended up shortening the URL myself with bit.ly and posting it manually to Twitter.

Then I went to read an article on Stacy Johnson's Money Talks News (http://www.moneytalksnews.com) that included a video and saw that the video had a question mark on it.  When I clicked the video I got an error message that the video contained a third party component that I would need to install but it didn't tell me which one.  I had never had a problem with any of Stacy's videos before.  So, I sent an email to Stacy's tech support people and they suggested I contact the tech support for Blip.TV which is the video host they use.  So I emailed Blip.TV and they suggested I install the latest version of Quicktime and try again.  I checked my Quicktime version and compared it with the latest one available and I saw that I already had the latest version.  I told Blip. TV that videos on YouTube seemed to play properly.  They were baffled.

So today I reluctantly gave up using IE and set my browser default to the new version of Google Chrome that I had recently installed.  Like IE 9, I was able to define a list of pages to open by default.  I found that I could still drag a page to my taskbar and "pin" it - apparently a default action allowed by Windows 7, and the interface was as clean as IE 9.

Then I went to Blogger and installed Zemanta and it came up without a hitch.  I went back to Money Talks News and the video I could not view under IE 9 played perfectly in Google Chrome.  Then, I held my breath and logged into my online bank.  I had used an earlier version of Google Chrome at one point but it turned out to be incompatible with my secure banking logins at two different banks.  This time, however, it worked wonderfully.

Then, I remembered a friend of mine had sent me a news article about Google Chrome's new web store so I went up there and found extensions for my Evernote account, bit.ly, Google Translate, Webpage screenshot, Web of Trust search advisor (WOT - a handy tool to avoid websites known for malware, scams, etc), an Internet Movie Database access tool to quickly access the movie database by clicking on a movie title mentioned on a webpage or in a blogpost, my good old "blog this" helper, a Share tool for those websites that  don't have it already built in (like many foreign news websites), and even Chrome for a Cause that records my search clicks and donates to a charity of my choice (from a small but adequate list).  Since I do a lot of research I like the idea that my productivity also serves another worthy purpose.  All of these very useful extensions were found on just the first twenty pages of the Extensions listed on the Chrome Web Store site and there are a total of over 10,000 available.  So, I have been able to regain all the features I liked in IE 9 without all of the technical problems and added some great functionality from the Chrome Web Store too!

Now if I could just get Samsung to add more useful apps to my TV's app store!!
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Monday, March 08, 2010

Popular Science offers free archive of all 137 years of publication!

What a wonderful gift to anyone in the world interested in science and technology!  Popular Science Magazine has teamed up with Google to provide a freely available archive of all 137 years of its publication.  Each issue will include its original vintage advertising which will offer even more enjoyment.

I see they also offer a free iPhone app.  This is a publication that has obviously embraced the new distribution model offered by online access rather than fritter away valuable time trying to figure out ways to wring the last nickel out of the online public.  Kudos to you Popular Science!

Monday, September 28, 2009

"Add This" makes sharing content on social networks a snap

I found this article in the New York Times particularly interesting. I noticed that after connecting my Flickr account to Twitter and Facebook, that each time I posted an image to Flickr tagged with my special "snaptweet" tag to flag it for Twitter and Facebook, I was getting a lot more views within just a couple of days than I would normally get if I relied strictly on Flickr users' sporadic browsing. I found the same to be true for blog posts that were trumpeted over Twitter and Facebook. I have used other websites "share" options like YouTube and NY Times but assumed adding that functionality to my own blog posts (so posts found on a Google or Yahoo search could be shared with the researchers friends and colleagues) would be more complicated than I wanted to tackle.

But the NYT article mentioned a service called "Add This" so I checked it out and it made the whole process pretty painless! They provide the code to add a share widget to either a website or a host of other content management environments including Blogger. I use Blogger so I copied the Blogger template code and opened my Blogger template and pasted it in right where it said to do so. At first I couldn't find the right line of code but the key is to be sure to click on the "Expand Widget Templates" checkbox just above the window displaying the HTML code, then you see all of the code not just abbreviated sections.

In the last century, traditional media organizations hustled to get their product in front of the chatty elites; news magazines, for example, hand-delivered copies over the weekend to politicians and to other media. In the age of Twitter and Facebook, anyone can become a chatty elite, the social director of his or her own private admiration society. The hand-delivered copy has morphed into a Web article’s “share to Facebook” button.

Underscoring the trend, social networks are now an important source of traffic to many sites, in some cases challenging search engines as the top source of new visitors. For example, the leading referrer to PerezHilton.com, a popular gossip site, is Facebook. Nearly 15 percent of the gossip site’s visitors come from the social network, according to Compete.com, a tracking firm. Google ranks second, driving about 9 percent of visitors. - Share the Moment and Spread The Wealth by Brad Stone, NY Times

Friday, January 02, 2009

Available Apps Driving Consumer Phone Choice

A couple of weeks ago I posted an article about the popularity of music games that are now available for cell phones. Today, I read a new article that pointed out how the availability of thousands of new apps is becoming the determining factor on which phones consumers ultimately purchase:
"...With the advent of touch-screen technology and faster wireless networks, the new competition and cool factor [for cell phones] revolves around thousands of fun, quirky (and even useful) programs that run on the phones.

The popularity of such applications for Apple’s iPhone, the leader of the transformation, is driving a fierce competition among the makers of the BlackBerry and Palm devices, and even Google and Microsoft.

It heralds a new era in the allure of a mobile device — the phone is no longer a fashion statement but a digital bag of tricks...

...Since July, Apple has posted more than 10,000 programs to its App Store; 9 out of every 10 iPhone users have downloaded applications — more than 300 million over all, though those include software updates and repeat downloads. Some applications are free (like Stanza, which lets you download and read books) while others typically cost $1 to $10.

Other applications help users navigate roads, find friends and local restaurants, and play odd games, including one called Sapus Tongue, in which the user swings the phone to see how far he can fling an animated monkey on the screen.

Recognizing the business opportunities, the other major cellphone and software companies are getting into the app act.

Google recently introduced the Android Market, selling applications based on Android, its operating system for cellphones. In the spring, Research in Motion plans to introduce an application store for its BlackBerry devices. Palm is thinking of retooling its software strategy, while Microsoft is in the early stages of creating its own store for phones running Windows Mobile." - More: New York Times

I liked the application called Shazam that "lets users hold the phone up to a radio to identify within seconds what song is playing and by whom — and then give users a way to buy it on Apple’s iTunes Store, of course." Google also offers one that sounds really helpful called ShopSavvy, "in which users scan the bar code of any product using the camera built into the G1 smartphone from T-Mobile. The application, which is free, then searches for the best price online and delivers the information to the phone."

As usual, though, especially with a predominately young audience, the most popular application is a wacky simulation of the sound of flatulence available for 99 cents. Hey, at least they keep us from taking ourselves too seriously!!

I see that cell phone application development is also starting to attract some serious venture capital money. Apparently, Kleiner Perkins operates a $100 million fund for iPhone application developers.

Sunday, October 05, 2008

Google Customer Service for GMail Appalling

I almost didn't read this article because my primary email address is serviced by the University's Information Services department and I know the people there personally so assistance with a locked email account is just a phone call away. But, I recently switched my personal business ISP from a local provider to Qwest when I was finally offered DSL in my neighborhood two weeks ago. I already had a Gmail account so I simply changed all of my Paypal widgets to email me at my Gmail address and didn't bother to set up my email account through Windows Live - Qwest's email provider.

However, after reading this article, I guess I better get my email account through Qwest set up after all. Quite honestly, I had never given it much thought as to how to resolve a locked account with Goggle before although their policy of no live support does not surprise me. Customer service is an area that technology companies have had a cavalier attitude about for years although it was not always so. Somehow, they don't see the disconnect between shipping buggy products to market then refusing to put tools in place to assist customers who have problems with these products. This trend became even more pronounced when products went from desk top applications to online applications. No one, it seems, wants to really talk to their customers - they just want a valid credit card number. But, I would expect more from Google. Google has really deep pockets - thanks to millions of us customers - and surely can afford to offer live support for account access problems. After all, having a problem with your email access has a cascading effect with all of your other online activities. If you can't login to one of your other services and request a password reset, they mail it to your email address!

LOGGING on to Gmail or other e-mail service has become a routine of daily life, completed without a thought. What would you do, however, if you woke up tomorrow, plugged in your user name and password as you always do, but then received an unfamiliar message: “User name and password do not match”?

If you’re a Gmail user, what you’ll want to do after a few more unsuccessful, increasingly frantic attempts is to speak with a Google customer support representative, post haste. But that’s not an option. Google doesn’t offer a toll-free number and a live person to resolve the ordinary user’s problems.

Discussion forums abound with tales of woe from Gmail customers who have found themselves locked out of their account for days or even weeks. They were innocent victims of security measures, which automatically suspend access if someone tries unsuccessfully to log on repeatedly to an account. The customers express frustration that they can’t speak with anyone at Google after filling out the company’s online forms and waiting in vain for Google to restore access to their accounts.

Tom Lynch, a software entrepreneur who lives near Austin, Tex., discovered early last month that he had been locked out of both Gmail accounts he used; he had no idea why. He received boilerplate instructions for recovering his accounts that did not apply to his particular circumstances, which included his failing to maintain a non-Gmail e-mail account as a back-up. He said it took him four weeks, including the use of a business directory and talking with anyone he could find at Google, before he succeeded in having service restored.

A Google spokesman placed the blame on Mr. Lynch, saying he did not follow Google’s guidelines. The spokesman characterized Mr. Lynch’s ordeal as a praiseworthy illustration of Google’s tough security: “We have had no cases of falsely recovered accounts.”

Google does provide phone support to Gmail customers who subscribe to Google Apps Premier Edition, which costs $50 annually and includes larger storage quotas and other benefits. Customers who use the advertising-supported version of Gmail, however, must rely solely on what Google calls “self-service online support.” - NY Times

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Monday, April 28, 2008

Google says progress made in automated image recognition

I think Google efforts to automate image search is admirable, but I have doubts that object recognition will produce much improvement in educational searches, even if success is demonstrated in commercial searches. It would be helpful though if search engines would enable you to specify a "thing" parameter like person, animal, plant, or building. Advanced image recognition software should be able to make these distinctions. With this capability, I should be able to get many more relevant hits when I search for "Roman emperor" and not have to sift through pictures of somebody's cat!


Another aspect of a successful image search though, at least to an education researcher, is time frame. With my passion for history, I am constantly writing about historical people, places and things but I am interested in a particular time period. Unfortunately, time dimension is not something that can be determined by image analysis. This is the reason I usually include a century reference, like "1st century BCE" in my Flickr image tags.



Speaking of Flickr, Google should also reconsider some of its own biased search parameters. For example, millions of Flickr images are carefully tagged and represent a wealth of information but few turn up in the top results of a Google search. I can only assume this is because Flickr is owned by Yahoo and either Google purposefully chooses not to search Flickr or does not make any effort to optimize its search facilities to accommodate Flickr's database requirements.


"Although image search has become popular on commercial search engines, results are usually generated today by using cues from the text that is associated with each image.

Despite decades of effort, image analysis remains a largely unsolved problem in computer science, the researchers said. For example, while progress has been made in automatic face detection in images, finding other objects such as mountains or tea pots, which are instantly recognizable to humans, has lagged.

“We wanted to incorporate all of the stuff that is happening in computer vision and put it in a Web framework,” said Shumeet Baluja, a senior staff researcher at Google, who made the presentation with Yushi Jing, another Google researcher. The company’s expertise in creating vast graphs that weigh “nodes,” or Web pages, based on their “authority” can be applied to images that are the most representative of a particular query, he said.

The research paper, “PageRank for Product Image Search,” is focused on a subset of the images that the giant search engine has cataloged because of the tremendous computing costs required to analyze and compare digital images. To do this for all of the images indexed by the search engine would be impractical, the researchers said. Google does not disclose how many images it has cataloged, but it asserts that its Google Image Search is the “most comprehensive image search on the Web.”

The company said that in its research it had concentrated on the 2000 most popular product queries on Google’s product search, words such as iPod, Xbox and Zune. It then sorted the top 10 images both from its ranking system and the standard Google Image Search results. With a team of 150 Google employees, it created a scoring system for image “relevance.” The researchers said the retrieval returned 83 percent less irrelevant images."

Thursday, March 27, 2008

MailShadow offers Outlook and GMail Integration

MailShadow is a product that has real potential since it synchronizes calendaring information as well as email. The University has been struggling with trying to decide if central IT should adopt a centralized calendaring system for the entire university but has met resistance from Academic Affairs and the executive administration office that has Microsoft Exchange deployed there as well as the inhouse administrators of the open standards mail system deployed University-wide that does not play well with Exchange. I served on the committee looking at calendaring alternatives and no product handled an environment where different mail and calendar platforms were operating simultaneously very well. Microsoft offers a very competitive price on their client software but Exchange requires a hefty investment in server hardware and administration. At the College of Education we are not staffed to maintain our own mail system either. So, outsourcing the mail and calendaring services to Google and using MailShadow to integrate with Outlook is a very attractive option.



"Cemaphore Systems, a company that specializes in e-mail backup services, announced Wednesday a new product that allows people to automatically synchronize their e-mail, calendar and address books between Microsoft’s Outlook and Google’s Gmail. The service, called MailShadow for Google Apps, is being pitched as a “email continuity and disaster recovery solution.” In other words, it is intended to provide users of Outlook and Exchange, Microsoft’s mail server, with a secure backup. As such, it represents an interesting use of the Google computing “cloud” to provide a service for Microsoft users.

But the technology also would allow businesses to rip out their Exchange servers and run Outlook, which millions of users are familiar with, directly from the Google servers.

“If you are an I.T. guy and you can change the back end from Exchange to Google, and keep Outlook for your users, that’s a really interesting proposition,” said Matt Cain, an analyst with Gartner. “We’ll have to see if it works.”

Thursday, October 04, 2007

Berkeley Offers Full Lectures on YouTube

UC Berkeley must have worked out an "iTunes-U" type of agreement with Google and is now featuring their lectures on YouTube. They must have been granted special provider status, though, to get around the current 10-minute video size limit. Anyone can upload larger videos to Google Video, but YouTube really has the name awareness and high traffic volume that is needed to ensure widespread exposure. What is particularly nice about having the lectures on YouTube as opposed to iTunes-U is that you can directly link the video files to other web resources or embed the video inside webpages. With iTunes, you can provide only a link to the Apple introductory site to iTunes-U where visitors click on a link to launch the iTunes Store to browse and find the videos.


"YouTube is now an important teaching tool at UC Berkeley.

The school announced on Wednesday that it has begun posting entire course lectures on the Web's No.1 video-sharing site.

Berkeley officials claimed in a statement that the university is the first to make full course lectures available on YouTube. The school said that over 300 hours of videotaped courses will be available at youtube.com/ucberkeley.

Berkeley said it will continue to expand the offering. The topics of study found on YouTube included chemistry, physics, biology and even a lecture on search-engine technology given in 2005 by Google cofounder Sergey Brin.

"UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life, academics, events and athletics, which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community," said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley's vice provost for undergraduate education in a statement."

Wednesday, September 19, 2007

Google promotes advertising widgets

Google is seizing on the popularity of widgets — small online tools that function like mini-Web sites — for its latest push into advertising.

An ad for Honda Civic was an example of Google’s widget program. Users can give the ad a ubiquitous presence on the Web.

The online giant will announce today a Gadget Ads program that will provide tools for advertisers to run widget ads in Google’s AdSense network.

Marketers can use space within these display ads on Google’s network to show videos, offer chats with celebrities, play host to games or other activities. If consumers like the widget ad, they can save it onto their desktops or on their profile pages online on sites like Facebook and MySpace.

The new widget ads represent a more aggressive push by Google to attract big brand advertisers who like flashy ad units rather than the simple text ads commonly run in Google’s ad network.

One big advantage of the technology is that the consumer does not have to click through to a Web site. A weather widget, for example, would constantly update the weather report in a particular area. Similarly, marketers could feature content to attract consumers while constantly updating their own messages.

More than 48 percent of Internet users in the United States — over 87 million people — now use widgets, according to comScore, the online measurement company. Some of the most popular widgets on Facebook, for example, are the “Top Friends” tool, which allows people to go to their best friends’ profiles with a single click, and iLike, which lets users add music to their profiles.

“Consumers are pulling in content from multiple sources” said Christian Oestlien, a business product manager at Google who is overseeing the new ad program. “It is what we are calling the componentization of the Web. The Web is sort of breaking apart into smaller pieces.”

Monday, August 27, 2007

NOT AGAIN! Micropayments resurrected.

I read this article with some trepidation - another push for totally commercializing the net. Although the author makes a point about iTunes sales being a type of micropayment and Google AdSense being another example, I can't help but shudder at the thought that web content should all be viewed as a direct revenue source. And we talk about the digital divide now!

"The idea of micropayments — charging Web users tiny amounts of money for single pieces of online content — was essentially put to sleep toward the end of the dot-com boom. In December 2000, Clay Shirky, an adjunct professor in New York University’s interactive telecommunications program, wrote a manifesto that people still cite whenever someone suggests resurrecting the idea. Micropayments will never work, he wrote, mainly because “users hate them.”

But wait. Amid the disdain, and without many people noticing, micropayments have arrived — just not in the way they were originally envisioned. The 99 cents you pay for a song on iTunes is a micropayment. So are the tiny amounts that some operators of small Web sites earn whenever someone clicks on the ads on their pages. Some stock-photography companies sell pictures for as little as $1 each.

“Micropayments are here,” said Benjamin M. Compaine, a consultant and lecturer at Northeastern University who specializes in media economics, “they just have not evolved in the way that everybody expected.”

From the earliest days of the Web until around the time of Mr. Shirky’s manifesto, the expectation was that a handful of companies would provide platforms — or perhaps a single ubiquitous platform — that would enable Web users to pay a penny, a dime or a dollar for a bit of content such as a newspaper article, a comic strip or a research report. Simply clicking a link would complete the transaction.

Sellers of content — at the time, newspaper companies — were among the most interested in the idea as they looked for revenue that did not depend on advertising...

Bill Densmore, a founder of the payments firm Clickshare, a former newspaper publisher and now a consultant and a director of a citizens’ media project at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, has been promoting micropayments from the beginning.

He envisions Web publishers joining with one another and with producers of other content to create huge networks, sharing users and, in effect, revenue.

For example, he said, a large newspaper could sell subscriptions that would allow its readers to download music from iTunes or Rhapsody, read articles from regional papers, and watch movies and TV shows from YouTube or Comedy Central."


Why do we need to reinvent the gatekeepers!!! We have access to all of these things by paying our ISPs. It would be just like the cable companies who "select" what channels we can get at what tier level and you end up paying for a lot of trash just to get a handful of channels that you actually want to watch! NO THANKS!!

Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Google turns to overlay advertising to gain ROI on YouTube

I realize nothing in life is really ever free so it was just a matter of time before Google wanted ROI on it's $1.35 billion investment in YouTube. At least these new ad overlays are much less exasperating than "preroll" ads. Preroll ads have gotten totally out of control at movie theaters. This past weekend when I went to "The Last Legion" I had to sit through almost a half hour of ads before finally seeing the feature film (In fact I use the term "feature film" loosely - the film itself was so short it seemed like a made-for-TV movie). At least on a DVD you can fast forward through them. The worst part is I suspect that film editors are apparently slashing content to the point of making the plot seem choppy and disjointed just to accommodate this crass consumerism.


Ever since Google bought YouTube last November, it has avoided cluttering the site and the video clips themselves with ads, for fear of alienating its audience.

A demonstration of an ad for a movie on the bottom of a YouTube video. Real ads would not reflect the content of a video.

Multimedia

Sample Ad Spot Video (youtube.com)

The strategy helped cement YouTube’s position as the largest video Web site but didn’t do much to justify YouTube’s $1.65 billion price tag.

Now Google believes it finally has found the formula to cash in on YouTube’s potential as a magnet for online video advertising and keep its audience loyal at the same time.

The company said late Tuesday that after months of testing various video advertising models, it was ready to introduce a new type of video ad, which it said was unobtrusive and kept users in control of what they saw.

The ads, which appear 15 seconds after a user begins watching a video clip, take the form of an overlay on the bottom fifth of the screen, not unlike the tickers that display headlines during television news programs.

A user can ignore the overlay, which will disappear after about 10 seconds, or close it. But if the user clicks on it, the video they were watching will stop and a video ad will begin playing. Once the ad is over, or if a user clicks on a box to close it, the original video will resume playing from the point where it was stopped.

Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Music Publisher Association joins copyright suit against Google

Why am I not surprised???

English soccer's Premier League and music publisher Bourne & Co said Monday that eight more parties have joined their lawsuit charging Google and its YouTube online service with deliberately encouraging copyright infringement.

The new parties include the National Music Publishers' Association, which is the largest U.S. music publishing trade association, the Rugby Football League, the Finnish Football League Association and author Daniel Quinn.

Video programming owners have teamed up against YouTube, charging the top online video service with encouraging copyright infringement to generate public attention and boost traffic to its site.

Google has said it is abiding by existing law that protect Internet services from being liable for what is on their networks so long as they respond promptly to complaints.

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Content Makers Are Accused of Exaggerating Copyright

This is a definite switch in viewpoint. It's particularly ironic since I've had such a struggle getting Corbis (Microsoft) to recognize my right to sell images I have taken of public domain artwork!

"An association of computer and communication companies, including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, on Wednesday accused several professional sports leagues, book publishers and other media companies of misleading and threatening consumers with overstated copyright warnings.

In a complaint to the Federal Trade Commission, the group, the Computer and Communications Industry Association, said that the National Football League, Major League Baseball, NBC and Universal Studios, DreamWorks, Harcourt and Penguin Group display copyright warnings that are a “systematic misrepresentation of consumers’ rights to use legally acquired content.”

The complaint alleges that the warnings may intimidate consumers from making legal use of copyrighted material, like photocopying a page from a book to use in class.

“It is an attempt to convince Americans that they don’t have rights that they do in fact have,” said Ed Black, the association’s president and chief executive. “This is part of the larger context of what should be and what are proper rules for copyright in an Internet age.”

The complaint asks the Federal Trade Commission to take remedial actions against content owners, like ordering them to provide a more accurate copyright warning, and to assist with efforts to educate the public on their rights."