A French consortium whose formation was announced on Thursday is planning to mount a challenge to Google’s book-digitization project and is hoping to secure some of the $1.1-billion in French-government financing announced this week for digitizing efforts, the Associated Press reported. Meanwhile, on Friday a French court dealt a blow to Google’s endeavor, which is still facing review by a U.S. court, by ruling that its project violated copyrights, The New York Times reported.
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One Response to Google Faces New Challenger and Legal Setback in Digitizing French Works
raymond_j_ritchie - December 26, 2009 at 3:18 am
The frogs trying to prevent Google from scanning french books is typical gallic stupidity and is self-defeating and futile. French scientists woke up to themselves in the last 20 years and started to quietly publish in english simply because nobody read (or more crucially could read) their papers. The reality is that with the exception of Canada, in most english-speaking countries it is almost impossible to find someone who speaks french and has scientific training. A graduate in french literature is no use for tranlating a paper in biochemistry. I personally only know two who would be able to help me with a french paper of interest to me: both have an interest in taxonomy and history of science. In practice, I have never had need to know the contents of any french publication. My lack of any german is sometimes a disadvantage.