3 Count: Censor Me

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1: Google Censors Piracy-Related Terms from Search Tools

First off today, Google recently made one of its promised changes to appease copyright holders and has removed many bittorrent and piracy-related queries from autosuggest and its instant searches. Though you can still search for these terms and produce results, they will not appear as you type in the Google search box. Currently blocked terms include phrases such as “bittorrent” “torrent”, “rapidshare” and “utorrent”, many of which are the names of companies or products, as well as terms routinely associated with piracy searches.

2: Law to Shutdown P2P Sites Resurrected By Spanish Coalition

Next up today, Spain’s controversial file sharing law, which will make it easier for copyright holders to target and shut down websites they believe are built for the purpose of piracy, will be making another appearance before Spanish Parliament. The bill, on its first vote, was shot down by a narrow margine, hard on the heels of the Wikileaks revelation that the law was written under pressure from U.S. interests. The new bill does make some minor changes, such as increasing judicial oversight, but it is largely the same as the earlier bill, but it came about after months of negotiations from the various parties supporting the bill.

3: Oops: No copied Java code or weapons of mass destruction found in Android

Finally today, blogger Florian Mueller’s allegations that Google had illegally copied code from Java in making its Android operating system have been refuted by Ed Burnette, which showed that the code that was allegedly infringing was not actually shipped with the Android operating system and, instead, was used solely for testing purposes. Though there was an odd licensing mistake in one file, it is a far cry from Mueller’s original claim that this bolstered Oracle’s case against Google by finding more infringements than they had alleged in their ongoing lawsuit.

Suggestions

That’s it for the three count today. We will be back tomorrow with three more copyright links. If you have a link that you want to suggest a link for the column or have any proposals to make it better. Feel free to leave a comment or send me an email. I hope to hear from you.

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