{"id":335,"date":"2005-02-22T15:40:30","date_gmt":"2005-02-22T19:40:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/benadida\/2005\/02\/22\/french-cultural-wars\/"},"modified":"2005-02-22T15:40:30","modified_gmt":"2005-02-22T19:40:30","slug":"french-cultural-wars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/2005\/02\/22\/french-cultural-wars\/","title":{"rendered":"French Cultural Wars"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/a><\/p>\n

The director of France’s National Library is worried that Anglo-Saxon culture will crush France<\/a>. He squarely blames Google, in an editorial entitled “When Google Challenges Europe.” More specifically, he bemoans Google’s recent deal struck with English-language libraries, whereby Google will index and make freely available online millions of published works.<\/p>\n

Mr. Jeanneney is right. European culture is indeed threatened when online resources overemphasize Anglo-Saxon works. But you don’t see Japan or South Korea complaining. Should Google stop its work? Should Google be regulated? According to certain French thinking, yes. Google’s already been ordered by French Courts to stop showing advertisements for Cartier when users search for Louis Vuitton<\/a>. “Unfair Competition,” said the courts.<\/p>\n

Unfair Competition? Now that’s ironic. In the fight of the Old vs. the New, the French have always been ultra-conservative. Old business models are protected, and new ideas are viewed with extreme skepticism. Mr. Jeanneney laments that Google’s work will kill off the quiet library reading rooms. Yes, and email will put an end to letter writing. And the telephone will kill personal human relationships.<\/p>\n

I love France and, of course, my entire family is from France. But one of the reasons I live and work in the US is that I refuse to accept this kind of complaining and rebuttals to fantastic human endeavors. What is this idea that everything should be tightly controlled in a top-down fashion? Google should be mostly free to innovate. France’s National Library is a great resource, and I’m certain a bit of negotiation and government assistance would convince Google to include it as a future target for indexing.<\/p>\n

But innovation is messy, and it certainly isn’t fair. If we want to improve the human condition – and I sincerely believe Google is doing just that – then we must accept that old business models will be threatened. Old traditions will be questioned. And people will have to compete for what they believe in. Enough with innovation by permission, already.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The director of France’s National Library is worried that Anglo-Saxon culture will crush France. He squarely blames Google, in an editorial entitled “When Google Challenges Europe.” More specifically, he bemoans Google’s recent deal struck with English-language libraries, whereby Google will index and make freely available online millions of published works. Mr. Jeanneney is right. European […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":93,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/93"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/ben\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}