You might not see today’s Google Books-pointing doodle as a moneymaking effort. After all, these Dickens e-books are free. And yet, surely, the aim is gravitate your mind and habits over to the Google eBookstore, where money is exchanged for enlightenment.

It seems clear some people will grasp at whatever straws they can find to make whatever Google does fit with their preconception that anything it does must be evil nasty commercialism. Come on! Dickens was known for his books, and Google has a great collection of them available for free. Why not link to them? Maybe someone will click through and read one, instead of just glancing at the Wikipedia entry about the man.

But no, Google must be crassly commercial for daring to give away these e-books that are undoubtedly infected with some sort of memetic virus that will make people want to come back and pay Google money.

Sheesh.

Google brings up the Cablevision case that legalized remote-operated DVRs, and the Sony v. Universal case that legalized VCRs and explicitly called “time-shifting” fair use, But the really interesting part is this argument:

The final principle concerns the interplay between two provisions of the Copyright Act which, by their plain language, are limited to material objects: the distribution right, Section 106(3), and the first sale doctrine, Section 109.  Both provisions deal with copies and phonorecords, which are material objects in which copyrighted works are fixed.  The present motion argues that the first sale doctrine—which permits the owner of a lawfully-made copy or phonorecord to sell it without needing the copyright owner’s permission—cannot apply to this case because no material objects change hands.  But it also argues that ReDigi infringes Capitol’s exclusive right to “distribute copies or phonorecords,” despite its admission that no material objects are distributed.  Either both provisions apply, and ReDigi’s service may be protected by the first sale doctrine, or neither applies, and ReDigi’s service does not infringe the distribution right.  Google takes no position on which outcome is correct but urges the Court to reject an internally inconsistent argument that would weaken the statutory restrictions on the distribution right.

(So much for taking no sides. That sure sounds like “Heads ReDigi wins, tails EMI loses” to me.)

Nonetheless, Google asks that the court deny EMI’s request for a preliminary injunction and proceed to consider the matter fully on the merits.

It reminds me of something my friends are prone to say when a football game suddenly goes from boringly one-sided to a close contest: “It looks like we’ve got a ball game.” The ReDigi case looks like it has the potential to go from a fairly one-sided and obvious copyright infringement lawsuit to a serious consideration of digital rights that could set some important precedents for the future of property rights in all electronic media, including e-books.

Three schools in Illinois, Iowa, and South Carolina will be outfitting all their students with the devices—over 27,000 in all. The schools appreciate the advantages the device offers of constant updates, cloud storage, and “invisibility” in terms of booting and use—teachers can focus on instruction rather than technical support.

Students do like tablets such as the iPad, but they seem to be taking to Chromebooks just as well.

"Students love the tablet. I am not going to hide that from you," said Diane Gilbert, an English teacher at Kelly Mill Middle School in Blythewood, S.C., who’s taught with tablets in her classroom. She added, though, that Chromebooks have a place: "They will bow down and kiss your feet for a tablet or for a [Chromebook]. But I’m a language arts teacher. My goal is to have students publish their work–create and publish. The [Chromebook] is more alike to a laptop or a desktop in the ability to publish."

Which type of device is better for education? The iPad will allow for interactive textbooks, but there’s no reason that such textbooks couldn’t be used on the Chromebook as well—indeed, Kno’s textbooks can be accessed from any web browser. And the Chromebook’s keyboard and Google Docs word processor means that students can write papers and other creative works on it much more easily than they could on the keyboardless iPad. At a suggested retail price of $349.99, the Chromebook is $150 cheaper than the basic iPad, too—a big savings when it comes to schools buying tens of thousands of them.

But Google is likely to carry on its battle with the authors, photographers, and other individual copyright holders. Some authors consider the fight a matter of principle. And even if Google convinced the individual named authors to settle their lawsuit, that wouldn’t prevent other authors from filing lawsuits in the future. So Google may have little choice but to seek a ruling from the courts that its scanning project is legal under copyright’s fair use doctrine.

One of the important questions is whether the authors’ lawyers can get class-action certification so they can claim to represent the interests of all authors. New York Law School copyright scholar James Grimmelmann notes this is an important question, because if they can’t get class-action status some of the plaintiffs’ lawyers will probably decide it’s not worth their while to continue representing so few clients. This is why Google is asking for the Author’s Guild to be dismissed from the suit—it will make it easier to argue against class-action certification.

If the case proceeds at its current pace, Ars Technica suggests, we can expect a decision on the question of fair use in late 2012 or 2013.

To read your Google eBooks offline, you’ll need to install the Google Books app from our Chrome Web Store and ensure your Google eBooks are available to read offline. Please see this article in our Help Center and follow the simple step-by-step process to enable offline reading for your ebooks.

Of course, it only takes a couple of clicks to download the PDF no matter what web browser you use, and that’s just as possible to read offline (and somewhat easier to find than the “make available offline” checkbox in the app). But perhaps Chromebooks don’t allow you to save downloaded content as readily; I don’t know.

(Found via Engadget.)

Now it seems like Apple wants to make it so people can wear their iPhone on their wrist, and perhaps interact with it with Siri. And Google may be working on something similar. This all might lead, in the next ten years, to real “Google goggles”, or otherwise computerized glasses, that use the smartphone as their processing hub. Wouldn’t that be an interesting way to read e-books, having the text floating in front of your eyes?

But Kevin Fogarty on the IT World blog says not so fast, pointing out that the New York Times obtained this information from anonymous and unidentified sources. Without knowing who they are, it’s impossible to gauge such sources’ reliability—or their motives for revealing what they do.

No matter how convenient, cool and wearable our computers become, they’ll still only be a conduit for the information we get through them.

If more and more of that information comes from "people" hiding their identities and touting products they hope they’ll eventually be able to produce and sell, we might be better off sticking with the old, clunky technology we have to stick in a pocket instead.

The library started carrying 21 Chromebooks last month, and they’re available for in-library use. Starting next month, patrons will be able to sign up to take them home for one week. The idea is apparently to show people how awesome the Chromebook is and make them want to buy one themselves. Google has been having a hard time selling the devices so far.

Palo Alto isn’t the only place Google is putting Chromebooks in front of would-be buyers.

Google is piloting the Chromebook in a few places where people can test out this “shareability,” and Google can get some user feedback. If you’re flying Virgin America, you might get offered a loaner for the duration of your flight. In September, New Jersey’s Hillsborough Library started lending them out for four-hour windows.

The Multnomah County Library recently bought 10 Chromebooks for test-driving purposes. “We’re currently testing them at five of the six libraries that currently have loaner laptops — mostly by asking staff to play with them,” says Jeremy Graybill, a spokesman for the Portland, Oregon, library. “Some branches have relationships with specific patrons that allows them to put the Chromebooks in patron hands for supervised evaluation.

Certainly the Chromebook’s cloud-based paradigm makes it ideal for checkout if any laptop is. Since the device essentially acts as a terminal onto Google’s web-based services like Gmail and Google Docs, it means a user only needs wifi and his account ID to access his own services from any Chromebook (or any other computer, for that matter). But the problem is, users are still more familiar with and accustomed to Windows’s way of doing things, and that’s going to be tricky to overcome.

(Found via our sister blog, Gadgetell.)

The guild argues the class should be approved because individual claimants “could not as a practical matter effectively assert alone against Google” such claims of infringement, and that “those claims are presented far more fairly and efficiently than they would be in individual actions, which would require the same issues to be litigated multiple times.”

The Authors Guild’s filing (PDF) doesn’t say anything about the fact that it really represents a considerable minority of the authors whose works would have been appropriated by Google. Google is expected to bring this up in its response and argue for multiple classes, each with its own counsel—which would mean the Authors Guild would lose a lot of control over the suit.

Although its response to this motion isn’t due until January, Google is expected to have a few things to say about it in its motion for dismissal which is due December 23rd.

(Found via GalleyCat.)

In a follow-up to yesterday’s story about Universal’s allegedly fraudulent takedown of a Megaupload promotional video, Torrentfreak reports Megaupload has instructed its legal team to file suit against Universal over the matter. (One of my friends noted that, if Universal really did do what Megaupload accuses, it should also be liable for criminal charges of perjury.) It will be interesting to see what happens.

Meanwhile, Cory Doctorow’s latest column in the Guardian discusses a similar though unrelated abuse of YouTube DMCA takedown procedures. Google offers rights holders a service called ContentID, which allows them to claim videos as theirs and then request that the videos be removed. (This is apparently what happened to Megaupload’s video.) However, instead of removing them, the companies can instead choose to “monetize” them—having YouTube play ads with them and then give the rights-holder the revenue for the ads.

Doctorow notes that a project called FedFlix has been established to pay the fees associated with retrieving copies of public-domain videos from the Federal Government (by law, any government-produced media is automatically in the public domain, but the government can still charge fees for the media on which it is issued) and posting them to YouTube, the Internet Archive, and other video sites so the public can see them without paying fees.

However, Doctorow notes, these videos are being targeted by a number of media companies with hundreds of infringement claims. The claims could endanger Fedflix’s YouTube account, and what’s more the way ContentID is set up means that Fedflix doesn’t have any way to contest them. The dispute resolution procedure requires a “rights-holder” to send YouTube a written permission notice—but in the case of these videos, there is no rights-holder; they’re in the public domain.

[Fedflix founder Carl] Malamud’s report documents these troubles in Kafkaesque detail. It’s frustrating reading. The American public paid to produce these videos, and they own them, lock, stock and barrel. Multinational companies – the same ones who cry poverty and demand far-reaching laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act – have laid title to them, "homesteading the public domain", and they are abusing Google’s copyright peace offering to steal from the public.

This puts me in mind of the way that some publishers have previously taken public-domain books, added a new introduction or foreword, and then claimed copyright to the whole book. It’s not too far-fetched to imagine that what some companies will do for movies, others might do for electronic renditions of printed matter. The same copyrights apply to all of it. We should all be seriously scrutinizing proposed laws like SOPA that have the potential for even worse abuses.

[Judge Chin] set a deadline of Dec. 23 for Google to file the dismissal motions. The plaintiffs will have until Jan. 23 to respond to the motions, and Google will have to reply to the dismissal oppositions by Feb. 3, Chin wrote in the order.

The article notes that even though most people refer to the Google Books case as a single lawsuit, there are actually three separate lawsuits from three different plaintiffs—the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and the American Society of Media Publishers. It is not clear which parts of which lawsuits Google will ask to dismiss, though TechWorld speculates Google might ask to dismiss the authors’ and photographers’ suits but not the publishers’—Google has been having better luck in settlement talks with them than with the other two groups.

It also speculates that the reason the Authors Guild filed a separate lawsuit against the HathiTrust library scanning project in September is that it saw chances of a successful settlement diminishing.

In any event, it looks as though after all these years we may finally start to see the legal issues behind the Google Books project get their day in court. I expect much of the publishing industry will be watching with great interest.

(Found via Slashdot.)

Meanwhile, cloud webclipper and memo pad Evernote has released a couple more mobile apps of its own. I mentioned Evernote’s new reading-format cleaner Clearly a few weeks ago, but now the company has come out with a couple of more specialized services. Evernote Food is a specialized app meant for documenting food experiences, with restaurant information, reviews, recipes, photos.

Evernote Hello “aims to modernize the standard greeting ritual.” (It’s nothing if not ambitious.) The idea is that you swap phones with the new people you meet so they can put their information on your phone and vice versa. It then stores that information linked to a picture of the person’s face so that a simple tap will call up details about who he is and where and when you’ve met. (I have to admit, this is the sort of thing that would come in handy for me given how hard a time I have remembering people’s faces. In fact I attempted to use Evernote itself that way for a while before giving up.)

According to Evernote’s founder and CEO Phil Libin, Evernote now has 20 million users, about twice what it had a year ago. and there are about 9,000 partner apps that use Evernote’s API in some way. That’s a lot of people using the cloud to keep track of their important information. The company has been profitable on its freemium model in the past, but a recent spate of expansion and hiring has caused it to dip back into the red.

The cloud is changing the way we keep track of a lot of written media—e-books, certainly, but also notebooks and even photo albums. Who knows what new innovation someone will come up with next?

More recently, Google announced it will shut Wave down entirely in April 2012. Wired’s Webmonkey column reports that Apache’s efforts with Wave are now available in the form of “Wave in a Box”, a standalone client/server application that replicates the Wave experience.

Wave in a Box consists of two parts, a standalone wave server and a web client. The Wave in a Box web client looks a bit different than Google’s Wave user interface, but the same features are present. The Wave in a Box tools also have the distinct advantage of decentralization. Developers can run wave servers and host waves on their own hardware without Google being involved in any way.

This will be a great resource for those who liked Wave and want to keep using it after Google closes it down, or who dislike Google having access to their collaborative information. Of course, there are plenty of other collaborative editing tools out there as well.

This release will be helpful for those who want to develop software for the Android, as well as those who would like to port it to various other devices that do not officially support it. I wonder if any new e-reading developments will come out of that?

(Found via Gizmodo.)

The company uses freelance journalists as ghostwriters, who interview experts and then write that expert advice up into books. The authors can write a book in less than a month, and keep up to 50% of sales. (Though it’s not clear at this point whether “authors” means the experts or the journalists who ghostwrite.)

Of course, this sounds a bit like Internet content farms that thrash out content based on popular Google searches in order to draw ad revenue. The CNet post itself makes the comparison to content farm Demand Media, which got hammered after Google added anti-content-farm code to its search algorithm. On the other hand, books aren’t ad-supported, and if Hyperink can put out high-quality content that people doing those searches will want to buy and read, more power to it. I’m not sure how they can really call it “self-publishing” if the company itself hires ghost writers, however.

The idea seems to be that if you find an interesting blog post or article, you can add its author to your circles and be notified whenever he does something else. Which sounds suspiciously like RSS feeds, albeit perhaps dumbed down a little for the average person who might have a hard time figuring those out. Which seems to tie back into the changes coming to Google Reader, too.

Is Google trying to “replace” RSS with Google+? (Or at least supplement it?) Could that be Google+’s real niche, rather than trying to compete directly with Twitter or Facebook? And will this get more people to bother using it? I suppose we’ll have to wait and see.