 It now seems long gone are the days when France saw Google as an instrument of American cultural imperialism which needed to be challenged by European governments. Earlier this month, the French Culture Minister officially asked Google for recommendations on how to promote the online presence of French culture. This constitutes a remarkable change of heart for France which, under the Chirac presidency, had planned the launch of European projects, such as the Quaero search engine, in order to challenge Google’s technological dominance and protect France’s cultural independence in the digital world. France now appears to consider that its culture and Google can thrive together. This u-turn can be explained by the pragmatic realization that anti-Google projects would fail as they have done in the past. A realization that France was all the more willing to make under its new president, Nicolas Sarkozy, a self-proclaimed pro-American eager to break with the policies of Chirac, his predecessor, former mentor and bitter rival. The reconciliation with the Californian company was also assisted by the reassurances given by Google to the Culture minister that its new filtering technology for YouTube would help secure the copyrights, and thus the revenues and future, of the French cultural industry.
On October 1, Christine Albanel, the French Culture Minister had a meeting with Mats Carduner, the CEO of Google France, where she invited Google to come up with “suggestions” and even “recommendations (…) to increase the presence of the French cultural heritage on the internet” according to the ministry’s press release. Entrusting Google with such a mission would have been unthinkable for France only six months ago. Google has been largely seen as a threat to cultural industries in France, and in the rest of the world, because of the wide scale copying of copyrighted materials its services enabled. Also, France feared that technological hegemony by Google, and other American companies such as Yahoo and Microsoft, would lead to American cultural dominance of the internet at the expense of French culture in general and the French language in particular. Google previously seen as a 'copyright villain' and a threat to French culture On the copyright front, two Google projects raised concerns for French content producers: Google Book Search and YouTube. And although these concerns were shared in other countries, including in the US, the reactions in France have been among the swiftest and strongest. Google Book Search, a scanning project to make vast collections of books accessible and searchable online, was accused of allowing the digitization and dissemination of books without the authorization of rightholders. In June 2006, La Martinière, a French publisher, sued Google before a Paris court for copyright infringement. The action which is supported by two publishers trade union (le Syndicat National de l'Édition et la Société des Gens de Lettres) is still pending (see story in the Register and post by Professor Philippe Gillieron). The other contentious issue between Google and copyright holders the world over relates to YouTube, Google’s video-sharing platform. Google has been accused by content producers of not doing enough to prevent and stop the sharing of illegal copies of copyrighted movies and broadcasts. On this issue, the French angle is that, if piracy hurts the American entertainment industry, it further endangers the less robust French industry and by extension the future of French culture. Google, by failing to stop copyright infringements, was, in essence, accused of undermining the ability of the French cultural industry to finance itself. The other, more political, allegation was that Google was also threatening French culture by increasing the reach of American culture and of the English language. The politics and failure of projects to counter Google The wider fear, expressed by former President Jacques Chirac, was that Google’s technological dominance would increase Anglo-Saxon cultural imperialism, at the expense of French and European culture. The way to counter such influence would be for France to find European partners to create alternatives to services offered by American companies. Interestingly, this line of thinking was the exact transposition in the field of technological and cultural policy of the French strategy initiated by De Gaulle, and embodied by Chirac, in foreign affairs: building and leading European partnerships to counterbalance American hegemony.  To challenge Google Book Search, Jean Noël Jeanneney, the former president of the French National library, convinced Jacques Chirac of the necessity to pool the resources of different European libraries to digitize their documents. However, the resulting project called “ Europeana”, still at its early stages, so far pales in comparison with Google’s offering. Indeed, whereas Europeana involves the national libraries of France, Hungary and Portugal and offers access to 12,000 documents, Google Book Search can count on more than 18 universities worldwide and offers more than 10 million digitized documents (as of March 2007), with more than 3,000 new documents added every day. Even more ambitious was France’s project to create a European search engine capable of competing with Google on its own turf. The project known as Quaero (Latin for “I seek”) was to be lead by a Franco-German public-private consortium. However, the project, announced in 2006 by Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, the former German Chancellor, seems to have grounded to a halt when the Germans decided, in January 2007, to opt-out of Quaero to focus on a smaller domestic research effort called Theseus ( story in The International Herald Tribune). The International Herald Tribune offered various possible explanations for the German departure. Firstly, there was a conflict between the French and Germans over the design of Quaero, the former wanting an elaborate multimedia search engine but the later wanting a simpler text-based search engine. Secondly, many German participants questioned the whole idea of a top-down project. Many were also concerned of being associated with an anti-Google project. Lastly, and perhaps more importantly, the newly elected coalition government of Angela Merkel did not want to foot the bill for a project elaborated by the former Chancellor. Merkel considered that the case for such a project had not been made, especially since it could be perceived as being motivated by anti-Americanism at a time when she was trying to mend fences with the US administration. France now seems to have reached the same conclusion as Germany: government lead projects aimed at countering Google are unlikely to succeed in promoting non-American culture. Like in Germany, this change of outlook can be explained, in large part, by a change of political personnel. Google as a copyright convert and champion of French culture? The assessment that the strategy initiated by Chirac would fail was easy to make for the Sarkozy government. During his presidential campaign Nicolas Sarkozy had vowed to break with the past, a policy known as the “rupture”. This particularly targeted, though implicitly, the legacy of his former-mentor-turned-arch-enemy Chirac. One area where Sarkozy differs with his predecessor is on its attitude towards America. Contrary to Chirac, Sarkozy is pro-American. For instance, he was quite happy to declare that “America was the greatest democracy in the world”, raising a few French eyebrows in the process. He was also willing to risk some political capital by spending his first presidential holidays in the US, cozying up with the much reviled Bush administration. In the light of such daring feats, addressing Google as a potential help rather than a threat for French culture seemed like an easy challenge for the French government. This change of attitude was also helped by the reassurances given by Google on the copyright front. During the meeting with the Culture Minister, Carduner explained how the newly unveiled filtering technology for YouTube would stop piracy. If you can’t beat them, join them It will be interesting to see what will be Google’s recommendations and particularly how they would interact with already existing projects to boost the online presence of French culture. One such project is the internet portal culture.fr, opened in August, which gives access to 1.5 million documents and is a priority for the Ministry of Culture. In any case, the decision to consult Google on cultural policy constitutes an important change for France and could lead the way to further cooperation with technology companies, as it is often the case in other countries. As ZDNet points out, the British Library is collaborating with Microsoft on the digitization of its collections ( see press release). SOURCE - Christine Albanel souhaite une plus forte présence du patrimoine culturel français sur l’Internet. Communiqué du Ministère de la Culture, 2 octobre 2007. - Agence France-Presse, La France veut de la visibilité sur Google. Technaute.com, 3 octobre 2007. - Estelle Dumout, Numérisation et droit d'auteur : la ministre de la Culture consulte Google. ZDNet France, 4 octobre 2007. - Hélène Puel, Google appelé à la rescousse du patrimoine culturel français. 01net., 4 octobre 2007. - Le ministère de la culture s'intéresse à Google. Ratiatum.com, 4 octobre 2007. - Christine Albanel, ministre de la Culture, appelle Google à la rescousse pour valoriser le patrimoine culturel français sur internet. La Republique des Lettres (via French Politics), 5 octobre 2007. - Arthur Goldhammer, France makes peace with Google . French Politics, 5 octobre 2007. - John Oates, French publisher sues Google. The Register, June 7, 2006. - Philippe Gillieron, Google Book Search sued by French publishers. IP Phil, October 30, 2006.
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