{"id":87531,"date":"2009-12-17T19:40:00","date_gmt":"2009-12-18T00:40:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/techdirt.com\/articles\/20091215\/1637117371.shtml"},"modified":"2009-12-17T19:40:00","modified_gmt":"2009-12-18T00:40:00","slug":"sarkozy-to-throw-another-billion-at-digitizing-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/87531","title":{"rendered":"Sarkozy To Throw Another Billion At Digitizing Books"},"content":{"rendered":"

As a few folks sent in, Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged to spend approximately $1.1 billion scanning books<\/a>. Does this sound familiar? It should. Five years ago, French officials freaked out<\/a> about Google scanning all those books, and declared they were going to spend $2.5 billion<\/i> on its own project, called Quaero. And what happened? Well, it turned into a huge boondoggle<\/a> with a bunch of companies claiming the money, but nothing of substance ever coming from the project, which has now been mostly abandoned.<\/p>\n

So, now we’ve got Sarkozy — defender<\/a> and mass infringer<\/a> of copyrights — who recently warned that Google’s book scanning project was somehow a threat<\/a> to French culture. So, now he’s going to spend $1.1 billion more on a project that we hope will be at least marginally more well defined than Quaero. In the meantime, France’s national library is apparently all set<\/a> to have Google scan its collection of books. Seems easier. In fact, the report notes that the $1.1 billion will go to private companies to scan books, and it’s entirely possible that Google could be one of those companies. After all, it’s pretty good at book scanning.<\/p>\n

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As a few folks sent in, Nicolas Sarkozy has pledged to spend approximately $1.1 billion scanning books. Does this sound familiar? It should. Five years ago, French officials freaked out about Google scanning all those books, and declared they were going to spend $2.5 billion on its own project, called Quaero. And what happened? Well, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-87531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=87531"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/87531\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=87531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=87531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=87531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}