Google Notebook
Being a student at an online university (UMUC), Google Notebook sounded great to me – I could save snippits of research on one subject all in one location. There was one catch – Could I save/note the library database pages that I have access to through the university? – things like ACM, IEEE, ABI/INFORM, etc. Notebook wouldn’t be very useful to me if I couldn’t access these important sources.
So, I just tested it out. You have to use Firefox or IE, which is OK, as I have to use FF to access the pages anyway, but you can view your Notebook in any browser by going to http://www.google.com/notebook/fullpage and logging in. I browsed to this month’s issue of Communications of the ACM and copied a chunk of text from an article and “Noted” it. I closed out firefox to have it drop my library session, then opened my notebook – The text is there. I also tried it in Safari, where there has never been a session to the library proxy, and I could read it there as well.
Notebook also allows you to make your notebooks public – I’m not making mine public, but it presents an interesting question: Whose responsibility is it to protect the copyrighted material? Google’s or mine?
May 16th, 2006 at 6:25 pm
Under copyright laws you can use copyrighted material for your own purpose without altering it or distributing it. It is not the responsibility of Google to be the cop here for what you save into GN as long as you keep it private. Now, as soon as people start making copyrighted stuff public they automatically become entangled in the whole situation. It is crucial to note that the Supreme Court, in regards to file-sharing programs, ruled that as long as the product and/or service is presented and acts in “good faith” is not directly responsible for individuals’ behaviors.
May 16th, 2006 at 7:48 pm
A section of the Google Terms of Service reads “You are responsible for maintaining the confidentiality of your account password, and are responsible for all activities that occur under your account.”
IMHO That pretty much indicates you’re to be held responsible for any sharing of copyrighted material you posted.
May 18th, 2006 at 1:27 am
Yet another Google program that needs to somehow be blocked in corporate environments.
Google Desktop, assuming you have installed the Outlook plugin, copies all Outlook emails into its cache when indexing. Even business-critical encrypted emails. It indexes them In the clear, because it grabs the content when you open the encrypted email.
Now, Google Notebook allows users to copy business-critical information into a website that we have no control over, the data is stored at Google (and presumably scanned, indexed, made searchable, added to the great big file about me somewhere) with no protection other than the Google username and password, which has been broken before.