The Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts (AO) announced on November 2 that it is looking for feedback on PACER through an online survey to assess user satisfaction with current services and generate suggestions for future improvements to the system.

Plans for a £2bn Home Office surveillance project to track details of everyone’s email, mobile phone, text and internet use have been put on hold after a consultation raised concerns over its technical feasibility, costs and privacy safeguards.

The Home Office has confirmed that legislation for the project, known in Whitehall as the “interception modernisation programme”, will not be included in next week’s Queen’s Speech and is unlikely before a general election. The fresh delay follows concerns raised by internet service providers and mobile phone operators over the project’s feasibility, and anxieties over who would foot the bill.

An ambitious website that will open up government data to the public will launch in beta, or pilot, form in December.

Reams of anonymous data about schools, crime and health could all be included.

Data.gov.uk has been developed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the web, and Professor Nigel Shadbolt at the University of Southampton.

It is designed to be similar to the Obama administration’s data.gov project, run by Vivek Kundra.

Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), Electronic Information for Libraries (eIFL.net), and other international copyright experts joined together today to launch Copyright Watch — a public website created to centralize resources on national copyright laws at www.copyright-watch.org. . .

. . . Copyright Watch is the first comprehensive and up-to-date online repository of national copyright laws. To find links to national and regional copyright laws, users can choose a continent or search using a country name. The site will be updated over time to include proposed amendments to laws, as well as commentary and context from national copyright experts. Copyright Watch will help document how legislators around the world are coping with the challenges of new technology and new business models.

Web portal Google Books’ initiative to create a digital library by scanning printed publications has triggered alarm bells in India, forcing the Centre to take up the matter with the US government. In a meeting held in the last week of October here, senior Indian officials told their US counterparts that the portal would encroach upon the copyrights of Indian authors and publishers.

Shortly before midnight last night, Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers released a revised version (PDF) of the Google Book Search Settlement, with some clear concessions to foreign rightsholders (as noted by Publishers Weekly), a vague—and, to critics, fatally inadequate—concession on orphan works. There was also no response to library concerns about pricing of the potentially monopolistic institutional database—an issue that Google representatives say can’t be addressed in the settlement.

The one notable response to criticisms from the library community was an agreement that, as Google representatives had already stated, more than one free public access terminal per library building may be authorized.

Redline version of the Amended Settlement Agreement

Late Friday night the parties to the Google Book Search class action submitted a revised settlement agreement to the federal court in New York that is hearing the case.

Unfortunately, the parties did not add any reader privacy protections. The only nominal change was that they formally confirmed a position they had long taken privately that information will not be freely shared between Google and the Registry.

The changes we’ve made in our amended agreement address many of the concerns we’ve heard (particularly in limiting its international scope), while at the same time preserving the core benefits of the original agreement: opening access to millions of books while providing rightsholders with ways to sell and control their work online. You can read a summary of the changes we made here, or by reading our FAQ.

. . . We may be watching a sequel to the DMCA story today. An international copyright agreement, negotiated under unusual secrecy, could impose a further round of restrictions on our use of digital technology.

This Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, or ACTA, represents an attempt by the United States and other countries to set common rules for violations of intellectual-property laws. The United States hopes to use ACTA to export its laws, but in the process it might have to import others.