Google’s email service Gmail is in trouble in Europe - or its name is at least.

In the UK, already a trademark dispute means that all new signups get @googlemail.com addresses instead of @gmail.com, and the branding on the actual webmail interface mentions ‘Google Mail’ instead of the shortened form.

According to this report, however, a German entrepreneur, Daniel Giersch, who offers an email service called G-mail is trying to battle Google in the courts to stop using the Gmail name.

However, Mr Giersch is now apparently taking the fight to the EU courts, meaning a judgement in his favour could have repercussions for all EU member states.

The current situation, for the UK at least, is that people who signed up before the name change retain @gmail.com addresses, and new signups get @googlemail.com. Sending email to both domains currently gets through to the right account.

However, it’s not clear at this stage whether this legal battle might cause Google to be forced to move all users residing in EU countries over to a Google Mail address, or if it has more potential issues.

This certainly must be a nasty headache for Google, not to mention Mr Giersch’s service and the confusion Gmail and G-mail must cause to him.

Bill Gates just appeared on the BBC’s 10 O’Clock news to promote the launch of Vista (he’s in London today). Huw Edwards, the newsreader, had been well briefed and asked good questions, one of which was why people in the UK will pay so much more for Vista than their US counterparts. Gates’ answer was that he wasn’t aware of how the exchange rate fluctuated, but that they had a ‘global pricing strategy’ and tried to charge the same for their products across different markets.

A quick check of the price of Vista in the UK compared to the US will show that that is patently untrue. The Amazon cost of Vista Ultimate is £353.99 in the UK, and $378.99 across the pond. The US price in sterling today is £194, which makes Vista Ultimate a massive £159 cheaper in the US!

I don’t think it’s fair to call that a global pricing strategy, and frankly it is unacceptable. Microsoft is able to charge so much more simply because the software market in the UK is more expensive, and it is taking advantage of people.

Gates is either not aware of the issues or he lied. I doubt that he would lie on television, and so perhaps somebody should tell him about the price difference?

This raises an interesting sidenote about the BBC decision to use Edwards rather than a technology expert like Paul Mason, Guto Harri or Rory Cellan-Jones; Edwards seemed to feel unable to put Gates under pressure on the subject of prices, which meant that Gates was able to simply say that he wasn’t aware that there was a problem. Perhaps somebody with more expertise would have been more successful.

The launch of Vista is upon us - today being the day you can get Vista off the shelf. We all should know how much money Vista will set you back by now, but security Peter Guttman is asking a different question.

Vista will have support for next-generation DVD formats HD-DVD and Blu-ray. Subsequently, this means it has the ability to decrypt content protected with the new AACS copy protection system built into the operating system.

In a nutshell, some of this copy protection allows content producers to deliberately downscale the resolution of ‘premium content’ if it’s not coming over a protected link, such as a normal DVI or VGA link to your monitor and not the new HDMI connector (with HDCP). The whole idea of this is to prevent the piracy of high definition content.

All the code to faciliate this has been built deep into the bowels of Vista, and Gutmann asks in his paper ‘A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection’ - is it worth it?

It’s a fairly technically heavy read, but it raises some very interesting points about this protection technology, and the performance and other costs of having this technology built into the OS.

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I was just skimming through my feeds when I noticed that a YouTube player popped up in Google Reader. That, as far as I know, didn’t happen yesterday, and so it appears to be a new feature:

As far as I know, Google is the first company to add this to their feedreader, and it certainly makes a useful feature. Google Reader really is innovating in a way which we are not seeing with the other feed readers (such as with their ‘trends’ feature), and whilst the display of embeds is hardly revolutionary, it is overcoming a major usability barrier to the widespread adoption of RSS feed reading. It is also a step towards integration of YouTube with existing Google products (it may be that Google has added the ability to view other embeds as well, however; I haven’t checked).

It is somewhat ironic that Peter instructs in the post pictured above to ‘click through for a YouTube embed’. I’m pleased that that is no longer necessary!

Google has outlined some of its future strategy regarding Google Video and YouTube, in a blog post by Salar Kamangar, VP of Project Management. It was always going to be interesting to see what Google did after its acquisition of YouTube given the close similarity of YouTube to its pre-existing Google Video.

They appear to have thought what the two products are for, to work out what to do with them in the future. They came up with this:

Google’s strength — and its history — is grounded in search and in innovating technologies to make more information more available and accessible. YouTube, meanwhile, excels at being a leading content destination with a dynamic community of users who create, watch and share videos worldwide.

What lays behind that statement is a recognition that YouTube is supported by an enormous network of users who enjoy using its social networking features. Google Video does not have such a network. It therefore makes sense to find a role for YouTube which leverages this network, and a role for Google Video which moves away from attempting to build such a network and into an entirely different sphere.

It seems that Google are doing this by moving Google Video back to its routes as a way to search for video content (initially Google Video was a way to search within video content, although it did not host the videos, and you weren’t able to watch them). Kamangar writes:

Over time, Google Video will become even more comprehensive as it evolves into a service where you can search for the world’s online video content, irrespective of where it may be hosted.

To that end, Google is including YouTube videos in results for Google Video from today.

So, where could they move Google Video to in the future in order to further support their vision? One idea might be to buy Pluggd, the podcast directory and now search engine. Pluggd has a great technology which allows you to search for terms inside audio files, and then see where they occur the most on a heat map. Whilst this currently works only for audio files, I imagine it would be trivial to make it work with video codecs. It will be interesting to see whether Google is willing to include videos hosted on rivals to YouTube on Google Video; on the one hand, it would make GVideo infinitely more useful, but on the other could move significant traffic to competitors. Definitely a conflict of interest there, and it will be a test of Google’s “evilness” to see what their decision is.

All in all, as rich media becomes more and more important on the web, it is clear that Google is aware of the need to make sure that it is in a good position to become dominant in the new area as well as the old, and the strategy they announced today looks like it will go a long way to achieving that.

“FreeNation Foundation is the name of the organization we are attempting to form with the idea of starting a new nation.” With that sentence, GhostOutlaw, a member of the FreeNation Foundation, began an interview we held this past Thursday. I wasn’t only interviewing GhostOutlaw though, several others were in on the fun (namely Dpx and Democritus, both established members of the FreeNation community), and many more were watching and contributing their answers to my questions in another IRC channel.

The subject of the interview was the project to found a nation on the ideals of a free culture. The effort has been dubbed the “FreeNation” project, and already has gained support from a wide community that spans the globe. Initially created by The Pirate Bay (a BitTorrent tracker) as an effort to navigate around copyright laws, the project has advanced into a fully-fledged redesign of human culture in an attempt to fix the problems that we have faced up until this stage of our existence.

On “core”

“We are forming an organization that is fluid, and has equality through the ‘ranks’. Today I may be head of a group, tomorrow I might be digging a ditch.”

This equality and community building was always in focus throughout the interview. They have good reason too - the FreeNation community had lashed out harshly when a small group of members (”dubbed as ‘core’ thanks to Brokep, Public Relations of The Pirate Bay” said GhostOutlaw) attempted to push the project forward more quickly by creating their own IRC channel which was password protected. Their secrecy and connection to the Pirate Bay lead to confusion and uproar in a week old project.

“The initial starting of core was a few members who found that some of the IRC chat was a little to spammy to actually have a cohesive discussion,” explained GhostOutlaw. “[We are a] ’structure group’ — we are trying to form the skeleton or structure to allow us to achieve our goals,” added Democritus. “The idea is that when we CAN handle the huge influx of interest, we will actually be able to accept those into our community and give them JOBS!!!”

No one knows exactly what jobs will be available. For now, this “structure group” is focused primarily on releasing a website and rolling out a public relations move that will help encourage increased donations. Although the plans aren’t set in stone as to how the website will be put in place, Dpx said that they “plan to have a wiki and a forum, that much has been decided.”

“But I know it’s island fever and I got it real bad” - The Beach Boys

The overall plan for FreeNation is to buy an island, on which the group will promote a free culture. It was said most concisely by Democritus: “We wish to establish a collective of like minded individuals on an island colony, to provide a place where a new society can be born and raised, to learn from our own mistakes, and those of the past to provide a better future for all of mankind.”

Details were vague, and I was routinely assured that “we are working out what exactly the goals are.” It is understandable - the project has only been around for ten days. Community was stressed as well. GhostOutlaw pointed out that “the end result will be whatever the community wants to be. It’s a community project and a community effort.”

The community was built around the proposition of providing The Pirate Bay a safe haven from copyright laws. When the community took over the reigns, the idea was morphed. As Democritus told me, the idea was now much more focused on creating a new type of society that would promote Free Culture from all angles. When I asked about The Pirate Bay’s connection to the FreeNation Foundation, I was told that “what we have now is a highly evolved form of TPB’s idea. They did want to start a country for servers. They are part of our community.”

Looking forward

The FreeNation Foundation’s proposal is one that will continue to receive accolades and attacks. It’s a dramatic proposal that, whilst not yet successful, shows the power the internet holds in bringing people together. If the foundation achieves their goal, this new open culture will dramatically alter the landscape of culture all over the world.

The plan needs guidance though. As of now, it seems to be in more than capable hands. With the “group-formerly-known-as-core” helping to guide discussion and establish an infrastucture for conversation, the community’s input is relevant now more than ever. “As the community grows, it will shape and change and evolve. We are looking forward to being part of this process.”

Update: Digg here!

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Read more about the FreeNation Foundation by visiting their website and wiki.

The Guardian Unlimited reports that the BBC is in talks with Google over plans to distribute BBC content over Google Video initially, followed possibly by YouTube, which will be announced on Wednesday by Eric Schmidt. This is in line with many similar deals Google has struck, such as with ITN and Channel 4. However, there are a couple of interesting points raised in this case.

Firstly, it looks as though the type of content being made available may be different from that seen in most of the other deals; large broadcasting companies tend to use Google Video and YouTube primarily to promote their main distribution channel, rather than using it mainly as a way to make money. This has changed to some extent with the advent last year of the US Google Video which allows producers to sell their content, but that is currently not possible in the UK. The Guardian suggests that the BBC is looking into a revenue sharing deal with advertising shown alongside their content; if the BBC were to make full, primetime programmes available on Google’s sites funded purely from advertising that would be unprecedented.

This is important because it gives the BBC a chance to really monetise its content directly. At present some excellent content which would appeal to international audiences (particularly the US market) is simply not available outside the UK, and thus the BBC isn’t making any money on it. This money is important because it supplements the license fee paid by TV watching Brits. This situation would change if the BBC, at the touch of a button could upload its content which hadn’t been bought by a US network to Google Video and YouTube and watch the advertising money roll in from US viewers who would otherwise have been unable to watch.

For little additional expenditure, this deal will allow the BBC to monetise content it owns but has not been able to use to generate money before. This is surely a good thing, particularly given the lower than hoped for license fee increase this week.

Note from Huw - This is a guest post by my brother, Jack Leslie, edited by me.

Spore is a revolutionary new game, from the designer and creator of Sims, Will Wright, in which you essentially create your own character, evelove it and attempt to make it successful in the universe. It recieved much attention at the (now discontinued) E3 gaming conference last year, and its launch in the second half of 2007 is expected to be an enormous success. The game is built upon a series of stages in which you advance your creature. You start out as a single celled life form in the tide pool phase, in which you control your creature and eat things to evolve. This stage is quite similar to Pac-man, as it is in 2D. Some creatures can hurt you and others can be consumed. The evolution is the amazing thing about Spore; you can even change the bone and muscle structure. You can add parts like spikes and different forms of feeding e.g. filter feeding.

More after the jump.

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Zoho, the online office suite which we’ve reported quite a lot on has just added a new feature - integration with OmniDrive.

Huw reported a while back that Zoho were not planning to release their own ‘Zoho Drive’ application:

Raju confirms in the comments [of this post] that Drive will not now be released. I have mixed feelings on this. In some ways it helps them maintain the focus, and maybe Zoho/Adventnet isn’t the right company to do it. However, I liked the premise of it, and it is radically different from what the storage companies are interested in at the present.

Well, it seems that the OmniDrive integration announcement will fill this gap, and I’ve taken a quick look at the new integration features between OmniDrive and the Zoho suite.

More after the jump.

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I recently signed a petition on the 10 Downing Street website asking for the legalisation of making a private copy of a copyrighted work for personal use. This already happens anyway, and so it makes sense for this right to be enshrined in law.

I got an email from Downing Street today to notify me that the Government had responded to the petition, and I was pleased to see that they were in favour (my emphasis):

As you may be aware, in December 2005 the Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced that there would be a review of the intellectual property framework in the UK, led by Andrew Gowers.

The findings of this review have now been published and recommend the introduction of a private copying exception for the purposes of format shifting. This would allow individuals to copy music which they have legally bought on compact disc onto an MP3 player without infringing copyright.

The Government welcomes this recommendation and is currently considering how such an exception should be created in UK law.

From this statement, it would seem that the ‘format shifting’ exception extends beyond copying from music from CDs to MP3s to copying music from, for example, Microsoft’s PlaysForSure DRM to MP3. It being legal to format shift songs from a DRM format to a standard format would, for example, render any DRM cracking tool perfectly legal in the UK, and thus it would not be possible to order it to be taken down.

If my supposition is correct, and this law does come into effect in such a way as DRM cracking is legal, we could end up with an arms race of far greater proportions than seen before between the content owners who wish to be protected by DRM and those who don’t wish to have their content restricted. Given that all DRM is inevitably susceptible to cracking, I have little doubt that ultimately DRM would become unworkable if this law were passed.

That would make for an interesting situation.