Judge Considers Limits on Apple’s Future E-Book Deals

In a sometimes testy hearing in United States District Court in Lower Manhattan, Judge Denise L. Cote said that she was considering a plan in which Apple would negotiate contracts with publishers in a staggered fashion — possibly six to eight months apart — to prevent them from engaging in another price-fixing conspiracy.

Judge Cote ruled in July that Apple colluded with publishers to raise the price of e-books before the introduction of its iPad in 2010. Those charges were brought against Apple and five major publishers by the Justice Department in 2012. The publishers all settled, but Apple held out and went to trial.

The judge’s proposal was a scaled-back version of the guidelines put forth by the government last week, when it suggested that Apple be forced to end its agreements with the five settling publishers and avoid entering similar agreements with producers of movies, TV and music. Apple responded by calling the proposal a “draconian and punitive intrusion” into its business.

The publishers who settled also objected to the Justice Department’s proposed remedy, saying that it would fundamentally change their existing settlements.

In court on Friday, Judge Cote said that she wanted an injunction to be tailored so that it would encourage innovation in a rapidly changing e-book business and yet prevent collusion on price in the future.

“I have no desire to regulate the App Store,” she said.

But Judge Cote also slammed the publishers for lacking “contrition” and said that she feared future collusion in the e-book market. Although the publishers eventually agreed to settlements, none of them admitted wrongdoing.

Judge Cote said that the publishers had played “a rough and tumble game” and engaged in “blatant price fixing.”

“None of the publisher defendants have expressed any remorse,” she said. “They are, in a word, unrepentant.”

Lawyers for Apple and the government said in court that they would meet in the next week and discuss the judge’s proposal. Another hearing is expected later this month.

Apple and the Justice Department declined to comment.

Hachette Book Group, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster settled in April 2012; Penguin Group USA and Macmillan settled later. Penguin has since merged with Random House, which was not named in the lawsuit.

U.S. Assails New Limits on Internet in Vietnam

The decree, announced last Wednesday and scheduled to go into force on Sept. 1, states that personal blogs and social media sites “should be used to provide and exchange information of that individual only.”

In a statement, the American Embassy in Hanoi said that the new rule, called Decree 72, “appears to be inconsistent with Vietnam’s obligations under the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, as well as its commitments under the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.”

Vietnam has received some praise over the last year from human rights activists as it has begun drafting a new constitution that addresses civil liberties and religious tolerance. But like other Asian nations, particularly China, it is grappling with how to handle the widespread adoption of social media by its citizens — and its ability to broadly disseminate articles critical of the government.

It was unclear how the government would enforce the new ruling. In China, articles critical of the government are routinely disseminated on social media but then often swiftly removed, and searches for certain sensitive words or phrases are often blocked, creating a game of cat and mouse in which users try to outsmart the censors.

Hoang Vinh Bao, head of Vietnam’s Department of Radio, TV and Electronic Information, was quoted by the state-run VnExpress news site as saying that under the new decree, individuals would not be allowed to quote general information “from newspapers, press agencies, or other state-owned Web sites.” But he later calibrated the remarks to suggest that the decree would limit only the way that information from other sources was reposted.

Reporters Without Borders, a free-press advocacy group, has assailed Decree 72 as a “gross violation of the right to inform and be informed.”

In its report this year on civil liberties in Vietnam, Human Rights Watch credited Vietnam by noting, “On the surface, private expression, public journalism and even political speech in Vietnam show signs of enhanced freedom.” But the group added that “there continues to be a subcurrent of state-sponsored repression and persecution of individuals whose speech crosses boundaries and addresses sensitive issues such as criticizing the state’s foreign policies in regards to China or questioning the monopoly power of the communist party.”

The American Embassy also raised alarms on Tuesday about new requirements that could force companies like Google and Facebook to comply with Vietnam’s censorship laws, banning them from “providing information that is against Vietnam, undermining national security, social order and national unity.”

The embassy said such a requirement would “limit the development of Vietnam’s budding IT sector by hampering domestic innovation and deterring foreign investment.”

Bits Blog: The Limits of Facebook’s Search Tool

11:41 a.m. | Updated to clarify that companies like hotel chains were improving their Facebook presence even before Facebook introduced its search tool.

As I reported in Monday’s New York Times, Facebook is rolling out its Graph Search feature on Monday to all of its English-language users in the United States.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times Loren Cheng, head of the team of linguists working on Facebook’s Graph Search, says users’ own search experiences will be the biggest force prompting them to share more information.

In theory, the tool, which has been undergoing refinement since public testing began in January, will allow users to search through their social network to find friends or other connections with a common link — say, “women who like Mitt Romney and Nancy Pelosi and live in San Francisco” (Facebook reports there are 12) or “my friends who like hiking.”

In practice, Graph Search has many limitations. Because Facebook uses so-called structured search technology to scan the boxes and buttons that users fill out on the site, it’s only as good as the boxes checked.

For example, when I searched my social network for “friends who like ice cream,” Facebook only returned 12 results. Left out was the silent majority who regularly lick cones and never bothered to tell Facebook.

Graph Search also tends to be too literal, often failing to discern the broader meaning of specific data points. For example, a search for “my friends who work at newspapers” returned no results, even though several hundred of my Facebook friends have listed specific newspapers as employers.

In short, Facebook’s Graph Search lacks the intuitiveness that people increasingly expect — and often get — from Web search engines like Google.

“You can search for restaurants my friends like, but ‘like’ is still binary on Facebook — they hit the like button or not,” said Nate Elliott, a principal analyst at Forrester Research who studies social media. “What if I want to find restaurants my friends love on Facebook. Or ones that get at least 3 out 5 stars?”

“There’s a lot of nuance required to make this really useful,” he said.

Over time, Facebook plans to encourage people to share more data to make Graph Search more valuable.

When I was on my profile page over the weekend, for example, the site prompted me to like more television shows, pulling up a long list of suggested titles, from current hits like “Game of Thrones” to moldy oldies like “Benson,” a political comedy popular in the 1980s.

The company is also considering how and when to prompt people to check in more frequently and write reviews without being too pushy about it.

“After you check in, half an hour later, do you want to rate that restaurant?” said Loren Cheng, who leads the team of linguists working on Graph Search. Or would you prefer to be prompted during dessert? Facebook is trying to figure that out.

Mr. Cheng said users’ own search experiences will be the biggest force prompting them to share more information.

“In user experience studies of likes, they say ‘why does it matter that I like something, why does it matter if I check into some place?’ ” he said. “You almost have to get them to a search result and they say, ‘wow, that’s what can I get. Tell me what I can do to get better results.’ ”

The search feature will also get more powerful later this year, when Facebook intends to add the ability to search through the text of status updates as well as information posted to Facebook by some third-party applications, like hotel and restaurant review sites and the streaming music service Spotify.

Consumer brands are already scrambling to tune their pages for Graph Search, said Susan Etlinger, an industry analyst with the Altimeter Group.

For example, big hotel chains have already been trying to make sure every property has its own Facebook page. Those pages could be easily liked by customers and found in a future search by their friends.

“Down the line, when people are searching for a hotel, you want to show up as a hotel with a positive reputation,” Ms. Etlinger said. “The experience you have at a Marriott in Minneapolis may not correspond to your experience in Houston.”

Facebook’s partnership with Bing, Microsoft’s search engine for the broader Web, will also benefit from better Graph Search, since Bing users who choose to link that engine with their Facebook account can pull up results from their social network along with overall Web results.

“When I look at the potential to create a more unified experience, they are making a very smart play,” Ms. Etlinger said.

German Bill Limits Search Engines’ Free Access to News

The bill, which follows years of debate, came as the newspaper industry in Germany, as elsewhere, struggles to find new sources of revenue as readers and advertisers move online in droves.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right coalition, which faces an election in September, watered down its original plans amid pressure from Internet lobbyists, lawyers and others who argued that it undermined freedom of information. The opposition parties could still block the bill in the Bundesrat, the upper house of Parliament, where the government has no majority.

Google began an ad campaign in German newspapers and set up a Web site called “Defend your Web” to lobby against the proposals, saying they would result in less information for consumers and higher costs for companies.

The “ancillary copyright” bill now makes clear that search engines can publish “individual words or small snippets of text such as headlines” without incurring any costs.

They would have to pay for use of longer pieces of content, though opposition parties said the wording of the bill was vague and could lead to courts having to rule on individual cases.

“It is not at all clear who is now meant to be protected from whom and why there is this law,” said the opposition Greens on their Web site on Friday, saying the bill served neither cash-hungry publishers nor the free flow of information.

Google echoed such criticism.

“The law is neither necessary nor sensible. It hampers innovation and hurts the economy and Internet users in Germany,” said Kay Oberbeck, communications director at Google.

But the association of German newspaper publishers welcomed the bill as “an important element in the creation of a fair legal space in the digital world.”

They have argued that search engines raise the vast majority of their revenue from online advertising and that a substantial part of this come directly or indirectly from the free access to professional news or entertainment content produced by news media companies.

The German draft bill states explicitly that it is not intended to protect newspapers from the effects of ongoing structural changes in the market.