France slams Google and prints

French President, Jacques Chirac, has commission the French national libary to digitise its works and present a European archive of non-English texts to rival the Google print project, which aims to digitise major libraries.

It comes on the back of French objections that Google Print would present too much of an English-speaking view of the world, and be essentially Americanised.

Google has already suffered public relations blows in France, and last night lost a long-running court battle over trademark infringement involving two French travel companies.

Although Google is already advanced in both the technology involved, as well as the prgromme already being underway, concerns have already been raised about proprietary rights to the resulting archive, and use of necessary software for accessing and reading its content.

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