A French Fight Against Google | Deutsche Welle |

The headline on this Deutsche Welle article, i.e. "A French Fight Against Google", is ridiculous and misleading. The article is about Jean-Noel Jeanneney, the director of the French National Library, proposing that Europe launch a project similar to the Google Print project (which aims to make millions of English-language books available on the Internet). Applauding the effort and suggesting a coordinated plan to complement it with non-English books is hardly an attack on Google, is it?

What's sad (or funny) is that the article itself notes that:

...The early works to be digitized are likely to be old history books and literary classics whose authors are long dead. In the short term authors’ rights should be less of a problem than which works to choose. For Jeanneney, the task is how to convince his American rivals that his European mission is not, as has been reported, about declaring cultural warfare.

"It's not at all a war cry," he insisted. "It's normal that America is in the first rank to develop that wonderful gift to humanity. I'm not criticizing it, I just tell Europeans that America will play its game, and we must play ours."