US Search Engine Google has been attacked by the miniature President of France, Nicolas Sarkozy, due to its plans to put much of the classic literature from the entire world in a digital format. Sarkozy has said that he doesn’t want the French part of classic literature put up online to aid the profits of an American company.
Sarkozy spoke about the project at a meeting in Alsace, telling visitors that instead of helping Google France would instead put more money into their own digitisation of books instead of letting Google go ahead with their plans, which involve taking as much out-of-copyright literature as they can and putting the books up online in a searchable format.
“We won’t let ourselves be stripped of our heritage for the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is,” said Sarkozy.
“We are not going to be stripped of what generations and generations have produced in the French language,” he added, “just because we weren’t capable of funding our own digitisation project.”
You might be thinking that the whole point of being out of copyright is that nobody owns the rights to these books now, not even the French government. However, this isn’t a case of France not ‘allowing’ Google to use the books; they just want to put them up through a French site before Google gets a chance. No, we’re not sure why either.
France has fought Google in the past, too. In 2005 the county decided to team up with Google to produce a search engine called Quaero to be a competitor to Google search, although the Germans later dropped out of the project. Then, as we see here, it seems more important to the French government that keep a sense of national pride in the face of growing globalisation than actually helping out internet users, French or otherwise.
Who knows how this will end? Hopefully whoever manages to get their works up ‘first’ will allow them to be viewed by all, and that other countries will be less hostile about a project that has very little to do with making money and much more to do with making knowledge and literature available to everyone.
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