French Threat to iTunes

I think it was in Arthur Clarke's great sci-fi thriller that a character described the French, in a nasty obiter dictum, as the "world's greatest second raters." Now even the fop-loving leftish tabloid New York Times is knocking the French penchant for their anti-competitive, anti-capitalist dirigiste bias.

Still, the article's author and others note that in the past, France has been strong on intellectual property rights. Perhaps the reason for the irrational French stance lies in the growing senility of what once was a major creative force in the world, French inventiveness.

"France has been the global leader in enforcing strong copyrights." Usually, rich countries don't meddle with others' intellectual property because they fear retaliation. So why don't the French fear retaliation now?

One reason may be that they have concluded France will never really compete. If the Internet will always have an American accent, why not go after it? Sometimes, the red flag of revolution is surprisingly hard to distinguish from the white flag of surrender.

Indeed, the Financial Times has an article on the politically bankrupt president of the country's new drive to create a French version of Google. Fine, go ahead and waste your money, but just don't try to get Chinese and block French users from the much better technology and faster service Google provides.

Since Waterloo and more notably, the Franco-Prussian War, the French have had to live on their historical laurels in any pretensions to political/economic/military ascendancy. But their penchant for delusions lives on in the 35-hour workweek, the Common Agricultural Policy, and promotion of their language and culture in an extravagant fashion. French membership on the UN Security Council was a post WWII sop to keep the country from veering into a Communist dead end and is now an anachronism. Now they want to be Luddites on the Information Superhighway. The author ends his article with an historical reference apt for a globalizing world:

The other reason, though, could be that the French politicians simply did not consider the possibility that other countries might retaliate against the intellectual property of French companies. The heads of several French biotechnology, telecommunications and electronics companies are probably starting to fidget.

The fate of France's budding intellectual property revolution now rests with the French Senate, which will decide in the coming days whether to proceed. Before declaring pre-emptive war on iTunes, however, perhaps the French would do best to remember a lesson from 1789. Sometimes the very people calling for revolution are the ones who end up losing their heads.

No chance that the Sorbonne and Nanterre campuses will empty into the streets to protect iTunes's rights in the near future. The next generation of French students, as Daniel Cohn-Bendit has noted recently, is as backward and selfish as the '68 May students were avid for change and renewal.