While Google continues to digitize everything from the view from the driver's seat to the contents of your appointment book , their tremendous attempt at digitizing the written word, Google Books , has run into a snag in the most ironic of places - China. While the country is infamous for copyright infringement , especially of intellectual property, it too is working to prevent the unfair use of its citizen's copyrighted works. Bloomberg reported this morning that Google "has agreed to meet demands from a local writers' group that it stop scanning and uploading books to the company's online library without authors' permission." Sponsor The company found itself in a Chinese court last month facing allegations of copyright infringement by Chinese author Mian Mian, whose book can still be seen in preview on the Google service . This certainly isn't the first time Google has run into complaints over its practices with the project. Last month, the company was convicted of violating France's copyright laws . A Globe and Mail report on Google's practices stated that over 80% of the French books offered were still under copyright. The company has also faced criticism in Germany over its Google Books service, where today the German minister of Justice warned that the company may be reaching monopoly status, requiring government intervention. The Bloomberg article notes that in China, Google trails behind the search engine Baidu . This is in a country with more Internet users than the entire population of the United States. But is the problem of supposed copyright infringement a public relations issue in a country where the average consumer sees counterfeit products in nearly every storefront window? While we stand on the side of writers getting paid for their work, we're not sure this issue would really stand in the way of Google gaining popularity in China. Discuss

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Google Faces Copyright Trial in Chinese Courts

ShoZu Goes to Critical Path - Cross Network Publishing Doesn't Seem to Be a Stand-Alone Business Hours after high-profile Silicon Valley social aggregation service Seesmic announced that it acquired angel-backed cross-network publishing service Ping.fm , a similar deal was announced in Europe. Identity management service Critical Path , maker of software called Memova, announced that it has acquired mobile uploading service ShoZu , a company that had received an enormous amount of venture capital. Sponsor Rumors of the deal were first reported in mid-December by Robin Wauters of TechCrunch . Now the deal is done, reports leading European mobile blogger Ewan Spence . We're hearing that the announcement will be officially released later today. Update: We just received the official press release as well. ShoZu raised more than $30 million to build a mobile app that allows users to publish photos, videos and text to more than 50 different destination social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, Blip.tv and more. The service has long been popular on Nokia phones and sells an iPhone app for $5. Shozu was voted one of our readers' favorite mobile apps in 2007. For more about ShoZu see this Techcraver interview with the company's CEO. Critical Path is a little like a combination of Plaxo and Verisign. It offers messaging and social apps, APIs, Identity Management and Access Control. Was this the big exit that ShoZu's investors sought? Almost definitely not. Critical Path is an innovative service that's got some big customers like BT, France Telecom and Orange, but it's unlikely that ShoZu came at a high price. Spence alludes to the same when he writes that Critical Path "saw the potential of combining their Memova platform suite with ShoZu's engineering." Update: In the official release, ShoZu Board Director Nigel Pilkington from lead investor SEB Venture Capital UK, called the deal "a successful outcome for us." Maybe that's being polite, maybe it's true or maybe it was a small success financially. It's most likely a talent deal and evidence that cross-platform publishing tools like ShoZu, Ping.fm and competitor Pixel Pipe are probably not stand-alone businesses. Just like FriendFeed's aggregation across scores of APIs wasn't enough to make it a success outside of being scooped up by the much, much larger Facebook - these other companies that create the pipes for the tubes just aren't compelling enough to a large number of consumers. They do make nice acquisition targets, though, and show that the future of the social web may not be found in reading and writing to one single network like Twitter or Facebook. The savvy companies that are building value on top of those networks are also dedicating resources to bring on engineers skilled at working with far more networks to publish to or read from. Discuss

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2 Cross-Publishing Services Get Acquired in 1 Day: Critical Path Buys ShoZu

Last week, we told you about peer-to-peer and torrent file-sharing sites were being systematically shut down all over China . Not too long before that, we let you know about file-sharing being monitored by a major ISP in the UK. Now, Israeli ISPs are throttling P2P network access, too, as confirmed in a report just released by an Israeli cyberlaw attorney and a partner news site. Whether you consider file-sharing an affront to content creators and copyright-holders everywhere or whether you see P2P networks as a permissible and valid way for users to exchange data, this trend is gaining considerable momentum around the world. Where will P2P restrictions pop up next? Sponsor In their research, tech attorney Jonathan Klinger and researchers involved with the Israeli website Ynet found that two of the three major ISPs in Israel are interfering with user traffic and might be conducting deep packet inspection. Traffic shaping is a practice sometimes used by some ISPs to discourage the use of certain applications. A couple of years ago, Comcast caught some heat from users and media for filtering user traffic when torrent files were being downloaded, even causing some to speculate that the ISP was violating U.S. law by prohibiting this traffic. Eventually, Comcast did strike a deal with BitTorrent to allow protocol-agnostic traffic management, but only after the sparring had been brought to the attention of the Federal Communications Commission. It's currently unclear whether Israeli ISPs are filtering traffic due to piracy concerns or simple due to bandwidth concerns, as shared files can often amount to multi-gigabyte, hours-long downloads. However, traffic-shaping that blocks P2P protocols can also apply to VoIP calls, IM clients and other applications. Although P2P traffic is associated with illegal downloads, nothing about the protocols themselves is inherently illegal. "The element common to all P2P services," reads the Israeli report, "is the lack of economical benefit to the ISP." Klinger noted that although complaints have been brought to media outlets and ISPs since 2007, the ISPs have typically ignored these criticisms. Netvision and Internet Zahav were the two ISPs determined by this research to be blocking file-sharing traffic. Bezeq International was the third ISP investigated. Although Bezeq was cleared by this particular investigation, a plug-in introduced last year from popular bittorrent client Vuze shows that this ISP, too, throttles and disrupts file-sharing network traffic. In response to the findings presented by Ynet and Klinger, all three of the investigated ISPs gave typically canned responses claiming to offer users excellent surfing experiences. Israeli Communications Ministry rep Dr. Yechiel Shabi told Ynet, "The research materials relayed to us paint a picture which arouses the need for thorough examination. After we become familiar with the study's findings, we shall consider the need for interference, supervision or regulation of the matter." So, while we wait to see what results this report will yield in Israel, we are left to ponder the perturbing question: Where will traffic-shaping pop up next to prevent P2P activity? Take another look at the findings from Vuze's traffic-monitoring plug-in . You'll see that ISPs around the world - including Verizon, BellSouth, AOL, AT&T, Charter, Road Runner and ISPs in France, Italy, Germany, Poland, the UK and the Middle East, to name a few locations - are already interrupting traffic. Vuze's researched was released in April 2008; in August, the FCC declared that ISPs should not be allowed to target and interrupt P2P applications. Still, suspicious Americans and other users around the world should consider using a tool such as the EFF's Switzerland to determine whether torrent downloads and VoIP calls are being interrupted by their ISP. Do Israeli or other ISPs have the right or the moral imperative to throttle traffic in this manner? Do they have the need or right to examine the applications, files, and protocols being employed by users on their networks? Or do ISPs around the globe need to read the wiki on net neutrality and get their act together? Let us know your experiences and opinions in the comments. Discuss

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P2P Sharing Being Blocked Around the World, Where Next?

Dominic Pouzin is a worldly, smart guy. After doing school and internships in France, the UK, South Korea and India, he moved to Atlanta where he took a job in the NBC (Nuclear, Bacteriological, Chemical) protection field. "I designed statistical models, programmed robots, and implemented access control stations for nuclear plants," Pouzin says on LinkedIn. He left that field to become a software engineer at Microsoft and this week launches his own startup company with a collection of former Microsoft co-workers. The new company is called Data Applied and offers "data mining in the cloud" - it applies automated algorithms to large sets of data in order to extract patterns, preconditions and outliers. Commercial licenses cost under $500 and are aimed to bring the kind of power to sales, marketing, engineering, social sciences or non-profit organizations that only banks and insurance companies used to be able to afford. Sponsor There's a Data-Centric World Emerging Data visualization tools are not uncommon online and there's a growing number of large data sets available for analysis these days. Microsoft unveiled a marketplace for data sets last month called Dallas . GigaOm's Stacey Higginbotham says data represents a big part of Microsoft's hope for the future. "Microsoft isn't just selling software anymore," she writes, "it's selling itself as a clearinghouse for information." Higginbotham points out similarities between Dallas and a startup we've covered here extensively called InfoChimps . Amazon started offering large sets of public data through its Web Services division last year as well. We've got high hopes that social networking data will be made more available for aggregate analysis, as a bird's-eye-view of society's interactions. We've written here before about how all of this data to be analyzed may or may not be put to good use ( Web 3.0 Might Be Really Stupid ) and Nicholas Carr recently wrote a provocative blog post about the consequences of data-driven recommendation on free will and human thought. You've Got the Data, Now What? Countless organizations have data sets of their own but that doesn't make extracting valuable information from them easy. Microsoft itself unveiled a similar looking service last month called Pivot , but it's invite-only for now and not thoroughly explained. We're familiar with DabbleDB , but Pouzin says Data Applied takes things much further than data visualization. "Simple reporting and dashboards are boring," Pouzin says. "They force analysts to manually visualize all possible combinations in the hope of finding some interesting facts. We do that automatically!" Data Applied performs a whole lot of data visualization functions as well, it's social and offer a multitude of related features while running on one or more computers. Can it really pull unforeseen patterns and meaning out of large sets of data, though? That sounds like a tall order to fill, but if enough numbers can be crunched that the mind of a human consultant is in fact unneeded - then Data Applied could be bringing to market a very valuable service. Discuss

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Ex-Microsofties Launch $500 'Meaning Machine' For Large Data Sets