The Bush administration will renew its effort to find out what people have been looking for on Google Inc.’s Internet-leading search engine, continuing a legal showdown over how much of the Web’s vast databases should be shared with the government.

Lawyers for the Justice Department and Google are expected to elaborate on their opposing views in a San Jose hearing scheduled Tuesday before U.S. District Court Judge James Ware.

It will mark the first time the Justice Department and Google have sparred in court since the government subpoenaed the Mountain-View, Calif.-based company last summer in an effort to obtain a long list of search requests and Web site addresses.

The government believes the requested information will help bolster its arguments in another case in Pennsylvania, where the Bush administration hopes to revive a law designed to make it more difficult for children to see online pornography.

Google has refused to cooperate, maintaining that the government’s demand threatens its users’ privacy as well as its own closely guarded trade secrets.

The Justice Department has downplayed Google’s concerns, arguing it doesn’t want any personal information nor any data that would undermine the company’s thriving business.

The case has focused attention on just how much personal information is stored by popular Web sites like Google - and the potential for that data to attract the interest of the government and other parties.

Although the Justice Department says it doesn’t want any personal information now, a victory over Google in the case would likely encourage far more invasive requests in the future, said University of Connecticut law professor Paul Schiff Berman, who specializes in Internet law.

“The erosion of privacy tends to happen incrementally,” Berman said. “While no one intrusion may seem that big, over the course of the next decade or two, you might end up in a place as a society where you never thought you would be.”

Google seized on the case to underscore its commitment to privacy rights and differentiate itself from the Internet’s other major search engines - Yahoo Inc., Microsoft Corp.’s MSN and Time Warner Inc.’s America Online. All three say they complied with the Justice Department’s request without revealing their users’ personal information.

Cooperating with the government “is a slippery slope and it’s a path we shouldn’t go down,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin told industry analysts earlier this month.

Even as it defies the Bush administration, Google recently bowed to the demands of China’s Communist government by agreeing to censor its search results in that country so it would have better access to the world’s fastest growing Internet market. Google’s China capitulation has been harshly criticized by some of the same people cheering the company’s resistance to the Justice Department subpoena.

The Justice Department initially demanded a month of search requests from Google, but subsequently decided a week’s worth of requests would be enough. In its legal briefs, the Justice Department has indicated it might be willing to narrow its request even further.

Ultimately, the government plans to select a random sample of 1,000 search requests previously made at Google and re-enter them in the search engine, according to a sworn declaration by Philip Stark, a statistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley who is helping the Justice Department in the case.

The government believes the test will show how easily it is to get around the filtering software that’s supposed to prevent children from seeing sexually explicit material on the Web.

The National Archives and Google are teaming up to allow unprecedented access to historical film properties for free with just the click of a mouse.

Through a pilot program, U.S. archivist Allen Weinstein has collaborated with Google Video to compile an online library of 103 films, including movies, documentaries and other cinematic creations formerly unavailable to those who can’t make the trip to Washington, D.C.

“This is an important step to achieve our goal to become an archive without walls,” Weinstein said. “For the first time, the public will be able to view this collection of rare and unusual films on the Internet emphasizing the importance of providing access to records anytime, anywhere.”

The diverse assemblage of titles can be accessed via Google Video as well as the National Archives Web site. They range from U.S. government newsreels documenting World War II to NASA-produced documentaries on the history of the space program. The earliest film preserved in the archives, 1894’s “Carmencita — Spanish Dance” featuring the famous Spanish gypsy dancer, also is included.

“Whether in San Francisco or Bangladesh, students and researchers can watch remarkable video such as World War II newsreels and the story of Apollo 11 — the historic first landing on the Moon,” said Sergey Brin, co-founder and president of technology at Google.

Other historic films in the collection include documentaries from the 1930s showing the founding of the national and state park system in America and the creation of Boulder Dam.

Formed in 1934, the National Archives and Records Administration is an independent federal agency serving as the nation’s record keeper.

The project is part of a more expansive effort by the search engine Google to make written and multimedia works from public and private libraries available online. The films join the increasing number of titles available on Google Video including CBS television shows, Charlie Rose interviews and NBA games.

Swiss and Belgian police have shut down a major component of the eDonkey file-sharing network, used mainly to trade copies of copyrighted movies and music, the Motion Picture Association said on Wednesday.

Razorback 2 was the biggest server on the eDonkey peer-to-peer (P2P) network, which transfers data from user to user. Music companies have blamed P2P piracy for causing a drastic downturn in sales, and Hollywood is trying to prevent a similar impact on the movie business.

“Swiss authorities arrested the site’s operator at his residence in Switzerland this morning and searched his home,” the MPA said in a statement. “At the same time, on the authority of a local magistrate, Belgian police seized the site’s servers located at an Internet hosting center in Zaventem near Brussels.”

As of last year, eDonkey was estimated to have up to 3 million users spread over 100 to 200 servers. Razorback2 was the most popular server, used by about 1 million users.

While the music and movie industry have had a string of successes in their fight against online piracy in the last year, raiding P2P servers and winning judgements in court, in many cases users merely migrate to a different network — a pattern than has happened many times since the original Napster service was shut down.

Source-Reuters

Google Inc. on Friday formally rejected the U.S. Justice Department’s subpoena of data from the Web search leader, arguing the demand violated the privacy of users’ Web searches and its own trade secrets.

Responding to a motion by U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Google also said in a filing in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California the government demand to disclose Web search data was impractical.

The Bush administration is seeking to compel Google to hand over Web search data as part of a bid by the Justice Department to appeal a 2004 Supreme Court injunction of a law to penalize Web site operators who allow children to view pornography.

Google is going it alone in opposing the U.S. government request. Rivals Microsoft Corp. and Yahoo Inc. are among the companies that have complied with the Justice Department demand for data to be used to make its case.

Google’s lawyers said the company shares the government’s concern with materials harmful to minors but argued that the request for its data was irrelevant. They offered a series of technical arguments why this data was not useful.

The Mountain View, California-based company said that complying with the U.S. government’s request for “untold millions of search queries” would put an undue burden on the company, including a “week of engineer time to complete.”

“Algorithms regularly change. The identical search query submitted today may yield a different result than the identical search conducted yesterday,” attorneys from Perkins Coie LLP, the company’s external legal counsel, argue in the filing.

Complying with the Justice Department request would also force Google to reveal how its Web search technology works — something it jealously guards as a trade secret, the company argued. It refuses to disclose even the total number of searches conducted each day.

Google’s resistance contrasts with a deal the company has struck with the Chinese government to censor some searches on a new site in China, a move that has drawn sharp criticism from members of the U.S. Congress and human rights activists.

“Google users trust that when they enter a search query into a Google search box … that Google will keep private whatever information users communicate absent a compelling reason,” attorneys for Google said in the filing.

The legal spat also comes amid heightened sensitivity to privacy issues by the company as it recently began offering a new version of its Google Desktop service that vacuums up data stored on user PCs and makes it accessible on the users’ other computers. For customers who consent to the service, copies of their data are stored on Google’s central computers.

Privacy activists have rallied to the defense of Google for fighting the U.S. government request while some conservative and religious organizations have criticized the company for failing to help the government combat child pornography.

The American Civil Liberties Union, with other civil rights groups, bookstores and alternative media outlets filed a friend of the court brief on behalf of Google.

The hearing on the Justice Department motion to compel Google to divulge the search data is scheduled to take place on March 13 in San Jose before U.S. District Judge James Ware.

“The government must show that this request is the most relevant way to accomplish its goal,” said Perry Aftab, an attorney, privacy activist and executive director of WiredSafety.org, a popular online child safety site.

“Why would Google or anyone else turn over data that might create further risks for their customers? The public policy gains don’t outweigh the risks,” she said.

Source-Reuters

Merrill Lynch and Co. said on Friday it had agreed to pay $164 million to settle 23 class-action lawsuits related to tainted research coverage of Internet companies by former analyst Henry Blodget.

The plaintiffs, who represent individual investors, said Merrill and Blodget issued bullish research about companies in a bid to get investment banking business from them.

Privately, however, Blodget disparaged the companies. In one case, he was asked in an e-mail, “What’s so interesting about GoTo except banking fees?” Blodget replied, “Nuthin.” GoTo.com is now a wholly-owned subsidiary of Yahoo.

The settlements are subject to further agreements and court approval, the No. 1 U.S. brokerage said in a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.

As a result of the settlements, plaintiffs will drop appeals in 11 cases in which motions to dismiss were previously granted, Merrill said. Another 12 had not yet been ruled on. It said 16 others were previously dismissed or abandoned.

“Even though we prevailed in virtually every research class action that’s been adjudicated, we are settling these cases because we want to avoid the distraction and expense of further litigation,” said Merrill spokesman Mark Herr.

“It’s a fair settlement,” said Herbert Milstein of the law firm Cohen Milstein Hausfeld & Toll, who represented 20 of the class-action plaintiffs. “This has been litigated for more than four years and we’ve had some adverse court rulings.”

Only two class actions related to Merrill’s research coverage of Internet companies remain. Herr said Merrill expects to win these suits, including one brought by a Merrill Lynch stockbroker that is now before the U.S. Supreme Court. The broker is charging that the fraudulent advice given by Merrill and Blodget caused both him and his clients to lose money.

Merrill said it would take a litigation-related expense of $170 million, or $102 million after-tax, in the fourth quarter for the settlements. The charge equals 10 cents per share.

The litigation grew out of investigations into conflicts of interest on Wall Street by New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who accused brokerages of issuing biased research to attract investment banking business.

That probe led to a $1.4 billion settlement in December 2002 between financial regulators and 10 Wall Street firms, including Merrill, who were accused of misleading investors with biased stock research.

Blodget, who joined Merrill in 1999 after his accurate prediction that Amazon.com’s stock would double in price to $400 a share, rode the technology boom until it crashed. In the settlement with regulators, he paid $4 million, and then went on to work as a journalist.

Lawyers for Blodget could not be reached for comment.

Source-Reuters

China, often criticized by the West for doing little to tackle widespread music and film piracy from the Internet, on Wednesday touted a four-month campaign it said resulted in 76 Web sites being closed.

Ofiicials said that since September, 172 cases had been investigated — including 14 after requests from overseas companies — and 76 had been shut down.

“Internet copyright infringement activities have been increasingly rampant, ” Yan Xiaohong, deputy director of the National Copyright Administration, told a news conference.

“It has severely disrupted the music, film and software markets,” he said.

Chinese people habitually download pirated music and movies due to the high price of authorized copies and government restrictions on cultural imports, while many Western movies are not even officially available.

Pirated music, movies and software are also sold openly on Chinese streets, a major irritant in trade relations with the United States.

Official figures show China now has about 700,000 Web sites and 110 million Internet users, making it the world’s second largest Internet market.

U.S. Trade Representative Rob Portman said on Tuesday that China’s failure to enforce intellectual property rights was helping inflate the huge U.S. trade gap with China, which hit a record $202 billion last year.

Yan said on Wednesday that China was considering signing two new international treaties to help fight digital piracy.

China has tried to appease the outside world with several crackdowns, tougher law enforcement and new legislation plans — in September, a Beijing court ordered Chinese Web search giant Baidu.com Inc. to stop directing users to Web sites offering peer-to-peer swapping of uncopyrighted music.

But analysts said the intermittent campaigns would not resolve the billions of dollars lost to Chinese piracy as claimed by Hollywood.

Source-Reuters

U.S. Internet companies faced fresh bipartisan criticism in the Congress on Thursday following heightened controversy over Yahoo Inc.’s alleged role in the Chinese government’s eight-year prison sentence against a second dissident.

“I don’t like any American company ratting out a citizen for speaking out against their government,” Rep. Tim Ryan, an Ohio Democrat and member of the House Human Rights Subcommittee, told Reuters on Thursday.

“This is the tip of the iceberg of a very oppressive regime that we have almost become accustomed to America,” Rep. Chris Smith, a Republican and chairman of the House Human Rights Subcommittee, told Reuters.

The storm over Western media companies’ compliance with China’s policies comes before next week’s hearing by Smith’s committee where lawmakers from both parties are expected to grill representatives from Yahoo, Google Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Cisco Systems Inc..

“There are probably others (dissidents) that we need to find out about. We are going to make sure it doesn’t get swept under the rug,” Smith said.

Google came under fire last month for bowing to Chinese government pressure to block politically sensitive terms on its new Chinese site. Microsoft has also angered human rights activists by blocking the blog of a critic of the Beijing government.

Yahoo spokeswoman Linda Osaka said her company was unaware of the details of the latest case raised by Paris-based international rights group Reporters Without Borders. The group said Yahoo provided electronic records to Chinese authorities that led to the imprisonment of writer Li Zhi in 2003.

“The choice in China and other countries is not whether to comply with local laws. The choice is whether to remain in the country or not,” Osaka said. “We have a philosophy of engagement. We believe the Internet is a positive force.”

Yahoo’s engagement includes a $1 billion investment last year to acquire a 40 percent stake in Chinese e-commerce company Alibaba.com, which now runs the company’s China operations.

Alibaba has moved all of its 2,000 Yahoo China servers from the United States to China, Alibaba’s CEO said last year.

Smith, one of the harshest China critics in Congress, said he wants legislation requiring companies to pull operations such as e-mail servers out of China and other countries that lack U.S.-style civil rights and due process protections.

Google is already engaged in a legal battle with the Bush administration over whether the Justice Department can force the Web search company to turn over data about its customers’ Web-surfing habits. The information is sought by the government to defend a law to prevent online child pornography.

Smith said the hearings set for February 15 will push Yahoo to reveal what information it provided to the Chinese government, the number of people involved and details on how Yahoo interacts with what he describes as the “secret police.”

“We only responded with what we were legally compelled to provide and nothing more,” Osako said. “We had a vigorous process in place to make sure that only required material was provided,” she said.

“Congress remains very concerned with the Chinese pressure on Internet companies to help in Beijing’s continuing crackdown on free speech,” said Rep. Tom Lantos, the founding co-chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.

“We are looking into ways in which the companies can resist or circumvent this pressure, and this will be Topic A at our hearing next week,” said Lantos, the ranking Democrat on the House International Relations Committee whose district includes the northern edge of Silicon Valley.

“The bloom is off the rose for the Internet industry,” said John Palfrey, director of an Internet think tank at Harvard Law School. “There is a sense that American companies have a higher obligation than has been practiced in China in recent years.”

Yahoo Inc. provided evidence to Chinese authorities that led to the imprisonment of an Internet writer, lawyers and activists said on Thursday, the second such case involving the U.S. Internet giant.

The latest storm over Western Internet companies in China comes just weeks after Web search giant Google Inc. came under fire for saying it would block politically sensitive terms on its new China site, bowing to conditions set by Beijing.

Writer and veteran activist Liu Xiaobo said Yahoo had co-operated with Chinese police in a case that led to the 2003 arrest of Li Zhi, who was charged with subverting state power and sentenced to eight years in prison after trying to join the dissident China Democracy Party.

Yahoo gave public security agents details of Li’s registration as a Yahoo user, Liu said in an article posted on U.S.-based Chinese-language news portal Boxun, citing a defense statement from Li’s lawyers.

A spokeswoman for Yahoo said the company was looking into the matter.

“As in most jurisdictions, governments are not required to inform service providers why they are seeking certain information and typically do not do so,” spokeswoman Mary Osako said.

“We would not know whether a demand for information focused on murder, kidnapping or another crime,” she said by phone from California, adding Yahoo thought the Internet was a positive force in China.

But media watchdog Reporters Without Borders said the argument that Yahoo simply responds to requests from authorities did not hold water.

“Yahoo certainly knew it was helping to arrest political dissidents and journalists, not just ordinary criminals,” it said in a statement.

PROFITS AND PRINCIPLES

The group, along with the Committee to Protect Journalists, also called on Yahoo to disclose information on all Internet journalists and writers whose identities it has revealed to Chinese authorities.

The case is the latest in a string of examples that highlight the friction between profits and principles for Internet companies doing business in China, the world’s number-two Internet market.

In September, Yahoo was accused of helping Chinese authorities identify Shi Tao, who was sentenced last April to 10 years in prison for leaking state secrets abroad.

Yahoo defended itself at the time, saying it had to abide by local laws.

In December, Microsoft shut down a blog at MSN Spaces belonging to outspoken blogger Michael Anti under Chinese government orders.

The government has also been pressuring mainstream Internet news Web sites in what analysts say is a tightening of the atmosphere for intellectuals.

A notice issued by the Beijing Internet Propaganda Management Office earlier this week listed media sites it said were reprinting information that went beyond what was lawful.

“At present, do not use what they report on political news; especially do not use them for frontpage news on the Internet,” the notice warned.

Its list included the Web sites of adventurous newspapers like Guangdong-based Southern Metropolis News, but also the International Herald Leader, which belongs to the state news agency Xinhua, and regional dailies such as the Lanzhou Morning News.

Print editions have also been targeted.

Chen Jieren, the chief editor of the Beijing-based Public Interest Times, was sacked on Wednesday over a report criticizing authorities, the South China Morning Post said.

The case follows the dismissals of the editor of the outspoken Beijing News and the closure of Freezing Point, the weekly supplement of the China Youth Daily known for its critical commentaries and investigative reporting.

The BBC accused Tehran on Tuesday of blocking its Farsi-language Web site, which it describes as one of the most influential sources of news in Iran.

The BBC says its Farsi site, BBCpersian.com, normally receives 30 million page views a month, making it the British broadcaster’s most popular foreign-language site.

An Iranian culture ministry official, who asked not to be identified, told Reuters in Tehran the Web Site had been “filtered since two days ago” but did not give a reason behind the move.

The site is read by about a third of the 7 million internet users in Iran, the broadcaster said in a statement. But it said access had dropped dramatically over the past three days since reports emerged that the Iranian government was blocking it.

“We are very concerned at this action and regret that it deprives a great number of ordinary Iranians of a trusted source of impartial and editorially independent news and information,” BBC World Service director Nigel Chapman said in the statement.

“The appetite among Iranians to know more about what’s going on — both in Iran and abroad — has never been greater,” he said.

President Bush made one of his rare public comments on broadband Thursday, promising that the United States will “do better” in increasing broadband penetration rates.

But he didn’t say how.

Taking audience questions after an economic address in the Washington area suburb of Sterling, Va., Bush was asked about legislative efforts to limit municipal efforts to establish Wi-Fi networks and America’s falling rank in worldwide broadband penetration rates.

“It’s interesting . . . because I laid out the opposite vision, which was that broadband ought to be available and accessible all throughout the country by a set period of time,” Bush replied, adding that it appears “Congress is trying to unwind that vision.”

In March 2004, the president set a goal of broadband access for all Americans within three years.

“We ought to have universal, affordable access for broadband technology by the year 2007, and then we ought to make sure as soon as possible thereafter, consumers have got plenty of choices when it comes to purchasing the broadband carrier,” Bush said at the time.

When Bush set the 2007 goal, America ranked 13th in broadband penetration rates. According to the latest numbers from the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), the U.S. has fallen to 16th.

The ITU analysts attribute America’s falling numbers to a lack of cohesive government policy while others attribute it the vast and diverse U.S. geography.

“You mentioned that other nations are ahead of us. True, we’re catching up — and we’ll do better, by the way,” Bush said Thursday. “Part of the role of government is to create an environment in which people are willing to risk capital. Broadband expansion is part of creating an environment in which it will make it easier for people to be competitive in this part of the world.”

The president called broadband expansion a “brilliant” idea.

“People are able to do so much more from their home, particularly if you’ve got the technology capable of carrying information,” he said. “One of the interesting questions we’re going to have is the last-mile issue, and a lot of that, hopefully, will be changed.”