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By David Rothman

Jacques ChiracFrench President Jacques Chirac and leaders from five other countries are advocating a Euro digilib picking up the contents of national libraries. Can they successfully address copyright and cultural issues? Will the French and the Germans be at odds? And what about “hate books”? Euro free speech isn’t the same as the U.S. variety.

How the project could be useful: If the Euorpeans handle this right and do not just think “Library” in the strictest sense, then interesting advances could happen in areas such as search technology. Various arms of the U.S. government are increasingly stingy with R&D, and this could be a chance to give the States some comeuppance. Google and Microsoft do R&D, of course, but remember where the World Wide Web came from–not Silicon Valley but Tim Berners-Lee at the European Organization for Nuclear Research.

Related: E-Commerce Times article, a Washington Post column, an AFP story, Deutsche Welle article mentioned here earlier, and other Google links.

 
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