France Surrenders To Google?

from the headlines-that-write-themselves dept

You may recall that, nearly five years ago, folks in France sounded the alarm: Google’s book scanning plan was a threat to French culture that needed to be dealt with. So, the government threw a lot of money at an ill-defined plan… and plenty of folks were quick to take the money, but not do much of consequence with it. Eventually, late last year, one small part of the project was revealed, and it looked decent. But, apparently that wasn’t enough. France’s national library (Bibliotheque Nationale de France (BNF)) has thrown in the towel and apparently signed up with Google to allow it to scan its collection. Of course, they could have done that five years ago and saved billions of taxpayer dollars… but what fun would that be?

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Companies: google

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Comments on “France Surrenders To Google?”

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19 Comments
william (profile) says:

beyonds me

Don’t quite remember the original story (if I have even read it), but it’s just dumbfound that someone is willing to spend millions to duplicate process/data just so that they have control over the data produced.

Not to mention that they really have no control, if the works are public domain or government archives.

Why do people have such an urge to control whatever they see, even if it doesn’t make sense?

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