14 DAY TRIAL // France seems rather confused about the whole Internet thing and it doesn't look like it has any idea of how to handle all the changes and new challenges it brings. On the one hand, it seems determined to put a stop to the horrible file-sharing plague that has taken over the country's Internet users much like in the rest of the world. To this end it’s willing to remove offenders' Internet privileges to make sure it sets an example.
The aim of this is apparently to protect France's great cultural legacy, which is in great peril at the hands of irresponsible pirates, otherwise surprisingly lawful citizens. It's clear that someone has to pay to support the crucial music and other similarly stricken industries. And if the people aren't willing, maybe some other companies, say Google, Yahoo or Facebook, should.
Yet, just as it proposes instituting a 'Google tax' to subsidize markets unwilling and unable to adapt, it's also looking for help from the company in an another area, that is book scanning. And the best part is that France has criticized Google for its book-scanning project on numerous occasions and has had several attempts at creating its own digital library, with varying degrees of success.
France runs a book-digitization program, dubbed Gallica, aimed at preserving and archiving out-of-copyright books, focused on French authors. The expensive project is publicly funded and hasn't been going as smoothly as it was hoped. To date it has amassed 145,000 books, compared with Google's more than ten million. An expert panel published their recommendations on helping the project gain momentum, as the New York Times reports, and an interesting proposal was to try to work closer with private companies. This is the very same report that proposed the 'Google tax'.
To this end, French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand, who hasn't always had the warmest words toward Google, is now said to be going straight to the source and meet with the company's representatives at Googleplex in Mountain View, California. There, he will try to enlist Google's help, but not unless the company makes several concessions. Chief among them is stopping the company from making exclusive deals with the organizations that agree to take part in the Google Books digitization project, like a municipal library in Lyon. Another big issue is the need for “greater respect for French copyright traditions” from Google. The company has recently been fined €300,000 in France over Google Books.