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12/09/09
Google: All ur Frenchbase are belong to us.
Sarkozy: Pardon??
12/09/09
What the french are up in arms about is that Google went directly to the National Library of France, and no one is precisely sure how (read: money) but for a while it looked like they were going to digitize their collection.
AND despite what Brin says, for a rights holder to have the right to withdraw a book from google books is great, EXCEPT when you regard the collection of a library as the national heritage of a whole country, then the idea of having them online for sale, or remunerating Google by ad revenue starts to seem really fucking horrible. Especially since Google is an avowedly American company, which would then be put in the position of actually storing the cultural heritage of FRANCE.
I'm not even French and just imagining it sort of starts to piss me off.
Imagine walking into your local natural history museum, seeing 1/35 of the only triceratops skeleton in existence (let's say), then seeing a sticker on a bone that says "triceratops brought to you by Google. Please visit our sponsor to see the rest".
Anyhow. The solution is for the French Government to just sack up and pony up the dough and resources. I'm pretty sure they're in the process of doing this themselves. If not, they should be. Google should NOT be in charge of this. Fiction, yes. Popular books, sure. Having a second copy of things... maybe. But be in charge of a National Library collection? Fuck you google. Fuck you.
12/09/09
As well, the article notes that the "digitisation of books would be one of the projects financed by a planned national loan".
So this is just political posturing on Sarkozy's part.
12/09/09
The BNF is as much to blame for this fiasco. They should have known better.
12/09/09
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12/09/09
And Google certainly IS an american company. It's founded and run by Americans, it operates with an american mentality, and obviously isn't beholden to any sort of continental concerns, or need to particularly respect any other countries. Your idea of "multinational" is a little specious - and sounds informed by science fiction.
12/09/09
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12/09/09
Just so you know the facts, YES, it MIGHT. The fact is that this service does not really yet exist, so legally lots of issues with rights are still up in the air. Read the words of Sergei Brin himself:
This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers.
Fundamentally, this is a project for profit. Maybe not a lot of profit, but profit nonetheless.
Some have claimed that this agreement is a form of compulsory license because, as in most class action settlements, it applies to all members of the class who do not opt out by a certain date. The reality is that rights holders can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether.
It very much seems to be a form of ad-hoc licensing. Brin is telling us that it's not terribly restrictive, and he might be telling us the truth. But fundamentally the necessity is for people to withdraw their works from the archive if they want to set their own pricing and sell it themselves. That's a license. And what if you do? Would your book therefore be removed from the majestic munificence of the Google Books Super Fun Happy Knowledge Project? Any idiot would think: yes. Yes it would. What if you tried to print or publish your own version while the book is still hosted in the Google archive. Do you think they would let you? Not fuckin' likely.
Google's not out to make the world better. It's out to be a profitable company. Why would anyone be so foolish as to think otherwise?
12/09/09
12/09/09
The non-sensationalist reason for France to be concerned is that if Google has 99% of their books posted with high accuracy, nobody will ever care about the government's "official" versions anyway. However, there's no reason why Google would share their data, aside from being generous.
12/09/09
02/06/09
02/06/09
02/06/09
Yes the article in question slipped into the vast darkness of the interwebs and is no more. We should all observe a minute of silence for our MIA Lego Mech comrades..
12/09/08
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12/09/08
Unless they've already done that, in which case... links???
12/09/08