Main Page «
Front Page «
Metro «
Business «
International «
Sports «
National «
Editorial «
Home «
Timeout «
Letters «

Archive «
Launch Supplement «
Special Supplements «

During a routine press briefing on February 26, the press secretary to the chief adviser of the caretaker government, Syed Fahim Munaim, made an extraordinary announcement. He said that Chief Adviser Dr Fakhruddin Ahmed would hold a series of ‘exchange of opinion meetings’ with local leaderships at various important places outside capital Dhaka. The purpose would be to know, first-hand, people’s views on vital national issues including, in particular, the holding of the general elections. The first such event took place in Chittagong the next day.
   This meet-the-people programme is reminiscent of the gimmicks of the extra-constitutional governments of the past. Those governments needed to improvise political props for the purpose of political engineering. But this government is based on the constitution, the state of emergency notwithstanding. The constitution has neither been abrogated nor suspended; the state of emergency has itself been promulgated under the constitution.
   It seems the chief adviser and his colleagues on the council of advisers have allowed themselves to be carried away by the prevalent euphoria certain sections of the political class feel about the demonstrative cleansing operations of the government. They tend to attribute, innocently or opportunistically, supra-constitutional powers and authority to the present government. They encourage it to carry out fundamental reforms of
   the polity.
   The constitution is, however, very clear about the status and role of the caretaker government. Article 58D.(1) says: ‘The Non-Party Care-taker Government shall discharge its functions as an interim government and shall carry on the routine functions of such government with the aid and assistance of persons in the service of the Republic; and except in the case of necessity for the discharge of such functions it shall not make any policy
   decision.’
   The constitution, thus, gives the caretaker government a very limited mandate as an ‘interim government.’ The constitution does not assign any messianic role to it. In the scheme of the constitution, the caretaker government is a very low-profile government — far, far away from the highway of politics and people. During a fully-fledged government, Article 55.(3) says, ‘The cabinet shall be collectively responsible to Parliament’ — a government of the people, accountable to the people through parliament. Article 58B.(2) says, ‘The Non-Party Care-taker Government shall be collectively responsible to the President’ — a government which works to the satisfaction of an individual who happens to be a temporary resident at Bangabhaban during its tenure of office. There is no scope for it to flaunt strong governance, not to speak of populism.
   This particular caretaker government is not even a caretaker government as usual. It is a product of an unmanageable political situation in which the caretaker government of Professor Iajuddin Ahmed was forced to resign. It was formed through a delicate constitutional evolution to fulfil the constitutional requirement to hold the aborted general elections which were scheduled for January 22 — a lifeline to constitutional governance. It came in the wake of a state of emergency purported to be imposed to stave off an impending collapse of the administration which had already called out the army in aid of the civil administration.
   The caretaker government of Dr Fakhruddin is, evidently, based on a very fragile foundation. As if totally oblivious to the grave situation, which demands circumspection, the government has chosen a gung-ho style of governance. Eager to pander to popular wish and demands for reforms, cleansing the polity of all the evils accumulated through years and decades, and invigorating the government through development schemes, Dr Fakhruddin and his colleagues now seem to be enjoying a walk in the clouds.
   There are no two opinions regarding the need for fighting against corruption and carrying out reforms. But the view that the twin factors — the caretaker government as reconstituted with Dr Fakhruddin as chief adviser and the emergency — provided a unique opportunity to undertake these tasks betrays both a miscomprehension of the mandate as well as competence of a constitutionally-installed interim government and a suicidal tendency to dismiss all the institutions of the state as dysfunctional under a normal, constitutional government — a spectre of a failed state. The people who hold such views forget that in spite of all the anomalies, shortcomings, failures, setbacks and tragedies in politics and governance, the people and politicians have not despaired or surrendered and have been carrying on a chequered political struggle to build a better country.
   The success of the Fakhruddin caretaker government will not, in the final analysis, be measured by the reforms it materialises or the measures it takes up to eradicate corruption. The yardstick for this measurement will be its success or failure in the performance of its fundamental election-related function as ordained in Article 58D.(2): ‘The Non-Party Care-taker government shall give to the Election Commission all possible aid and assistance that may be required for holding the general election of members of Parliament peacefully, fairly and impartially.’
   The Iajuddin caretaker government failed in this task, but the slide towards the abyss of extra-constitutionalism was stopped by installing the Fakhruddin caretaker government as a last-ditch measure. If this lifeline is snapped in the innocence of over-zealousness to perform as an agent of reforms or because of wilful negligence to normal constitutional functions, the country will be in danger of falling into the trap of constitutional derailment.
   The advocates, champions and cheerleaders of the current spell of populism of the Fakhruddin caretaker government need to pause and think. There is an old saying: The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
   NM Harun in contributing editor of New Age. He can be reached at: badrun123@dhaka.net

COLOMBO: The fifth anniversary of the Ceasefire Agreement passed without any dramatic intervention by either the government or the LTTE who had been its signatories. It was only civil society groups who thought it fit to mark the occasion in a positive manner and raise the question about the future of the peace process that the CFA had once given hope to. The civic groups were joined in this endeavour most notably by representatives of the international community who had placed, and continue to place, a great deal of faith in the ability of the Ceasefire Agreement and the peace process that it undergirded. In the context of the present climate of impunity this international solidarity was a source
   of strength.
   Civil society networks from all parts of the country and representatives of the four religions and civil society groups spoke of the need for a political solution rather than a military solution.  Ambassadors from Norway, the United States and Japan, and High Commissioners of Canada and Australia took part as speakers at a peace event at the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall. In addition, the Indian High Commission also sent a representative which confirmed the broad-based consensus of  the international community with the call of civil society for negotiations, peace and political reform.
   The key ideas that were expressed included expediting the political proposals of the All-Party Representatives Committee, honouring the mandate of the International Independent Group of Eminent Persons who are observers to the Presidential Commission to investigate Serious Human Rights Violations, and to resume government-LTTE peace talks. Perhaps not wishing to be seen as left out, the government and opposition political parties sent their political representatives who also addressed the gathering in accordance with the spirit of the symposium.
   The peace symposium showed that large sections of civil society are ready to take up the challenge of working for peace, reconciliation and a new political framework at the local level. However, as could be expected in a plural society, not all in either political and civil society were of the same mind. During the course of the month, a Sinhalese nationalist alliance led by the JVP, and with fasting Buddhist monks, has been aiming to pressurise the government into abrogating the Ceasefire Agreement, but so far to no avail.
   By saying that this agreement had been a mistake, President Mahinda Rajapaksa would have given them reason to believe that the government would go along with their demand. But the government has so far not taken any special measure to formally reject the agreement. Demonstrating the pragmatism for which he is noted, the president has also said that the existence of the CFA does not prevent the government from pursuing either its military strategy or political reform programme. The longer term challenge will be to win trust and confidence when agreements are so openly disregarded whenever pragmatism dictates.
   
   No peace
   There are no signs at the present time that the government or LTTE are looking to engage peacefully with the other. Government spokespersons, and not only the president, are continuing to say that their military strategy against the LTTE remains the same. In addition, posters have appeared throughout the country showing President Rajapaksa in the company of battle-hardened troops with their guns in ready position in thick jungles. This same photograph had earlier been published in the state-controlled newspapers. The message in the poster is that the battle commenced against the LTTE must be fought
   to a finish.
   Neither has the LTTE been any more conciliatory. They warn of more bloodstained pages in Sri Lanka’s history. Their contribution to the fifth anniversary of the Ceasefire Agreement was to come up with an analysis of its failure, which makes it no surprise that it was doomed to fail. According to the LTTE, the Ceasefire Agreement recognised the de facto existence of an independent state of Tamil Eelam, with a government of its own capable of entering into agreements with other governments. This was the same fear that has haunted the Sinhalese nationalists who seek its abrogation.
   Either deliberately or coincidentally, by claiming that the CFA recognised their government, the LTTE has provided more grist to the mill of the Sinhalese nationalists and enhanced their credibility among the general public as having made a proper analysis of the consequences of the Ceasefire Agreement. However, the CFA did nothing of the sort.  It was only an instrument to halt the fighting at the forward lines of each side. It opened the roads that had hitherto made parts of the country inaccessible due to LTTE-control on the ground.  But the CFA did not legitimise LTTE institutions, whether they were the LTTE police and judiciary or practices of child recruitment.  Whether or not those LTTE institutions of governance, good and bad, were to be legitimised was left to the political
   negotiations.
   The debate over the political implications of the Ceasefire Agreement highlights its main lacuna. This was the political vacuum within which the agreement was formulated. As a result, the CFA became an end in itself, which it was not. It was only a means to an end.  While the Ceasefire Agreement was indeed the centrepiece of the peace process, it was not an agreement that could stand alone. At best the Ceasefire Agreement froze the war, and the institutions of war, and kept them separated where they stood at the time of its signing. But the Ceasefire Agreement was not the political solution. Unfortunately, the hope of a resumption of the peace process any time soon seems unlikely.
   Jehan Perera is media director of the National Peace Council in Colombo, Sri Lanka. He can be reached at: Jehan Perera jehanp@yahoo.com

WASHINGTON: Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an enormous database being created by Google. The company is also retrieving books from libraries at several other leading universities, including Harvard and Oxford, as well as the New York Public Library. At the University of Michigan, Google’s original partner in Google Book Search, tens of thousands of books are processed each week on the company’s
   custom-made scanning equipment.
   Google intends to scan every book ever published, and to make the full texts searchable, in the same way that Web sites can be searched on the company’s engine at google.com. At the books site, which is up and running in a beta (or testing) version, at books.google.com, you can enter a word or phrase—say, Ahab and whale—and the search returns a list of works in which the terms appear, in this case nearly eight hundred titles, including numerous editions of Herman Melville’s novel. Clicking on ‘Moby-Dick, or The Whale’ calls up Chapter 28, in which Ahab is introduced. You can scroll through the chapter, search for other terms that appear in the book, and compare it with other editions. Google won’t say how many books are in its database, but the site’s value as a research tool is apparent; on it you can find a history of Urdu newspapers, an 1892 edition of Jane Austen’s letters, several guides to writing haiku, and a Harvard alumni
   directory from 1919.
   No one really knows how many books there are. The most volumes listed in any catalogue is thirty-two million, the number in WorldCat, a database of titles from more than twenty-five thousand libraries around the world. Google aims to scan at least that many. ‘We think that we can do it all inside of ten years,’ Marissa Mayer, a vice-president at Google who is in charge of the books project, said recently, at the company’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California. ‘It’s mind-boggling to me, how close it is. I think of Google Books as our moon shot.’
   Google’s is not the only book-scanning venture. Amazon has digitised hundreds of thousands of the books it sells, and allows users to search the texts; Carnegie Mellon is hosting a project called the Universal Library, which so far has scanned nearly a million and a half books; the Open Content Alliance, a consortium that includes Microsoft, Yahoo, and several major libraries, is also scanning thousands of books; and there are many smaller projects in various stages of development. Still, only Google has embarked on a project of a scale commensurate with its corporate philosophy: ‘to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and
   useful.’
   In part because of that ambition, Google’s endeavour is encountering opposition. A federal court in New York is considering two challenges to the project, one brought by several writers and the Authors Guild, the other by a group of publishers, who are also, curiously, partners in Google Book Search. Both sets of plaintiffs claim that the library component of the project violates copyright law.
   Putting books online: The story of how Brin and Google’s other co-founder, Larry Page, met as graduate students in computer science at Stanford in the mid-nineties, and devised a series of elegant software algorithms that allowed Web searchers to find relevant information quickly and efficiently, has become part of Silicon Valley lore. Less well known is that, at the time, Brin and Page were also working on Stanford’s Digital Library Technologies Project, an attempt, funded by the federal government, to organise different kinds of stored information, including books, articles, and journals, in digital form.
   After founding Google, in 1998, Page and Brin—who are now in their mid-thirties and worth around fourteen billion dollars each—began to talk about how to include books in the company’s database. Page, in particular, embraced the idea of putting books online; at one point, he set up a primitive lab in his office, with a scanner and a page-turning machine. ‘
   In 2002, Google quietly made overtures to several libraries at major universities. The company proposed to digitise the entire collection free of charge, and give the library an electronic copy of each of its books.
   [In December last], at the New York Public Library, Google hosted a conference on the future of the publishing industry. About four hundred people—mainly publishing executives and agents—attended, most of them grimly aware of the simultaneous lethargy and panic that have characterised their industry’s response to the digital age. Nearly all attempts to sell books in an electronic format have been disappointing, and now Google appeared to be encroaching on the publishers’ domain. The implicit message of the conference was summed up by a quotation from Charles Darwin that was projected on a screen: ‘It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change.’
   The lawsuit: [O]n October 19, 2005, several leading publishers, including Simon & Schuster, the Penguin Group, and McGraw Hill—all of which are partners in Google Book Search—filed a lawsuit against the company, seeking to stop the project. The publishers don’t object to Google’s plan for helping them sell new books, but they assert that the library component of the project is illegal. They claim that Google’s ‘massive, wholesale and systematic copying of entire books still protected by copyright’ infringes on the publishers’ rights. They demand that Google stop further copying and ‘destroy all unauthorised copies made by Google through the Google Library Project of any copyrighted works.’ (The Authors Guild filed its lawsuit around the same time.)
   Twisted history of copyright law: Copyright law dates to the birth of the Republic [the United States of America]. Article I of the Constitution assigns Congress the right to pass laws ‘securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.’ The first copyright law was passed in 1790, and it has been frequently and confusingly amended over the years, most recently in the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, which extended copyright terms by twenty years. (The law is also known as the Mickey Mouse Protection Act, because the Walt Disney Company, seeking to protect its copyright on early animated classics like ‘Steamboat Willie,’ lobbied heavily for it.) The twisted history of copyright law has insured an awkward passage into the digital age.
   The legal assertion at the core of Google’s business plan is its purported right to scan millions of copyrighted books without payment to or permission from the copyright owners. Approximately twenty per cent of all books are in the public domain; these include books that were never copyrighted, like government publications, and works whose copyrights have expired, like ‘Moby-Dick.’ Google has simply copied such books and made them available on the Web. Roughly ten per cent of books are copyrighted and in print—that is, actively being sold by publishers. Many of these books are covered by Google’s arrangement with its publisher partners, which allows the company to scan and display parts of the works.
   The vast majority of books belong to a third category: still protected by copyright, or of uncertain status, and out of print. These books are at the centre of the conflict between Google and the publishers. Google is scanning these books in full but making only ‘snippets’ (the company’s term) available on the Web. (Google searches turn up only the search term and about twenty words on either side of it.) Copyright law has never forbidden all ‘copying’ of a protected work; scholars and journalists have long been allowed to quote portions of copyrighted material under the doctrine of fair use. Google maintains that the chunks of copyrighted material that it makes available on its books site are legal under fair use. ‘We really analogised book search to Web search, and we rely on fair use every day on Web search,’ David C. Drummond, a senior vice-president at Google who is overseeing the response to the lawsuits, told me. ‘Web sites that we crawl are copyrighted. People expect their Web sites to be found, and Google searches find them. So, by scanning books, we give books the chance to be found, too.’ (Google also has an ‘opt out’ policy, which allows copyright holders to request that specific titles be omitted from the company’s database.)
   However, according to the plaintiffs in the cases against Google, the act of copying the complete text amounts to an infringement, even if only portions are made available to users. ‘What they are doing, of course, is scanning literally millions of copyrighted books without permission,’ Paul Aiken, the executive director of the Authors Guild, said. ‘Google is doing something that is likely to be very profitable for them, and they should pay for it.’
   Google asserts that its use of the copyrighted books is ‘transformative,’ that its database turns a book into essentially a new product.
   Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford have prohibited Google from scanning copyrighted works in their collections, limiting the company to books that are in the public domain. Because of the opacity of copyright law, and the extension of protections mandated by the 1998 act, it’s not always clear which works are still protected. (Copyright status can become murky when authors die or publishing houses go out of business.) Stanford has drawn a line at 1964 and prohibited Google from copying most works published since that date. (Several of the public institutions that are Google’s partners, including the Universities of Michigan, California, Virginia, and Texas at Austin, are allowing the scanning of copyrighted
   material.)
   The system of scanning books: The chief engineer of Google’s system for scanning books in the library.
   Google will not discuss its proprietary scanning technology, but, rather than investing in page-turning equipment, the company employs people to operate the machines, I was told by someone familiar with the process. Google will not reveal how much it is spending on the books project. In 2005, Microsoft announced that it would spend two and a half million dollars to scan a hundred thousand out-of-copyright books in the collection of the British Library. At this rate, scanning thirty-two million books—the number in WorldCat’s database—would cost Google eight hundred million dollars, a major but hardly extravagant expenditure for a multibillion-dollar corporation.
   Copying all those pages presents many difficulties, but writing software to make the books useful to searchers is even harder. ‘The scanning technology is boring,’ Clancy said. ‘The real challenge is to get somebody something that they are actually interested in, inside a book. Web sites are part of a network, and that’s a significant part of how we rank sites in our search—how much other sites refer to the others.’ But, he added, ‘Books are not part of a network. There is a huge research challenge, to understand the relationship between books.’
   Still, the basic search protocols function well. A search for ‘Heart of Darkness’ leads immediately to Joseph Conrad’s novel, which is not as obvious as it sounds, considering how common the words in the title are. As Clancy said, ‘If you put in ‘Heart of Darkness,’ we have to know that you’re looking for the novel, not a book about lighting conditions in cardiac surgery. So how do we do that? We rank some words more important than others. The title may matter more than the content, so we may weight that more. You could also look at what other people have searched for, so if everyone who searched for ‘Heart of Darkness’ clicked on the novel, we might
   figure that you probably will, too.’
   The most important data for ranking searches, Clancy explained, may come from Web pages that link to books in Google’s database. (For instance, if links on the phrase ‘Clinton’s autobiography’ direct users to a copy of ‘My Life’ on the books site, there is a high probability that people who use the same search terms will also want this result.) ‘We just started, and we need to make these books networked, and we need people to help us do that,’ Clancy said.
   Universal digital library: Google’s database contains many books in languages other than English, but for now they must be searched in the original tongue. On the company’s Web site, there is already a primitive translation feature, and it may someday be enhanced to allow books to be rendered in another language at the touch of a button. ‘In terms of democratization, you want to be able to access information,’ Clancy told me. In places like the Arab world, where few titles are translated into the local languages each year, he said, access to the world’s books could have a substantial impact. ‘We are talking about a universal digital library,’ Clancy went on. ‘I hope this world evolves so that there exists a time where somebody sitting at a terminal can access all the world’s information.’
   Bascally a business: Such messianism cannot obscure the central truth about Google Book Search: it is a business. Google has pledged not to show advertising next to the pages of library books, but the company does sell advertising alongside search results that lead to books obtained from publishers.
   The key legal question is whether the courts will allow Google to continue to scan copyrighted material without permission. But the schedule of the lawsuits may turn out to be as significant as the merits of the cases, which are before Judge John E. Sprizzo. In keeping with the stately pace of federal litigation, the depositions of witnesses are to begin sometime this year, and the parties will be allowed to file motions for summary judgment—in Google’s case, to dismiss the suits—in early 2008. Then there could be a trial. If the cases are appealed, they could linger well into the next decade.
   However, most people involved in the dispute believe that a settlement is likely. According to Pat Schroeder, the former congresswoman, who is the president of the Association of American Publishers, ‘This is basically a business deal. Let’s find a way to work this out. It can be done. Google can license these rights, go to the rights holder of these books, and make a deal.’
   The terms of such a deal aren’t hard to imagine. The Authors Guild is concerned that pirated copies of the books on Google’s site could leak to the public, and so the organisation would insist on security measures. (Sadly, for writers and publishers, demand for their products has never been robust enough to generate a major piracy problem.) As for distribution of the proceeds from the site, Google might agree to share revenue with publishers, in the way that radio stations pay for the music they play; publishers could receive a fee based on a statistical analysis of how often their books are viewed. Google could pay in cash or in kind, with advertising.
   But a settlement that serves the parties’ interests does not necessarily benefit the public. ‘It’s clearly in both sides’ interest to settle,’ Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford Law School, said. ‘Businesses in Internet time can’t wait around for years for lawsuits to be resolved. Google wants to be able to get this done, and get permission to resume scanning copyrighted material at all the libraries. For the publishers, if Google gives them anything at all, it creates a practical precedent, if not a legal precedent, that no one has the right to scan this material without their consent. That’s a win for them. The problem is that even though a settlement would be good for Google and good for the publishers, it would be bad for
   everyone else.’
   Source: The Internet. The article has been abridged.