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You obviously don't know anything about the French academic system and grandes écoles. Or you are being hypocritical. Anyway, back to the subject. The idea beh

by p4bl0 14y ago

You obviously don't know anything about the French academic system and grandes écoles. Or you are being hypocritical. Anyway, back to the subject. The idea behind all this is the following: there are a number of activities, for instance the press, which suffers from the internet. People read the news online and don't subscribe to paper press anymore. They also don't want to pay to much for reading the online press. To get good articles in the papers, you need to pay professional journalists. So the conclusion is that the press industry needs to find a new business model. As it happens, there are companies making fortunes on internet, and their business largely depends on the contents that is created by others. This is particularly true with Google and the press industry. If you see it that way, it seems only fair that Google participate in paying the journalists producing quality content that makes people use their search engine and/or see their ads. Now the question is, how to achieve this? Let the situation evolves and see what happens? This would lead to the decline in quality of the article in the press and eventually to entire journals disappearing, except for some of them for which some private groups have invested in. This is not something that we want because private interest and information don't mix well together. It is the case that many journals are in (sometimes big) part financed on public fund, so the other solution is to augment those public funding, and have the government take care of collecting the money. This is done using taxes. I hope this makes the intention clearer to those of you who don't live in France.

bitcartel 14y ago
Many US and British newspapers are behind a paywall. Are any French newspapers trying this? What have their results been like?
outside1234 14y ago
That is just crazy. If the papers need to raise money to pay journalists, they should put up paywalls. This is working at the New York Times, so why not in France?
jsnell 14y ago
I hear the automakers are also really suffering. And Google is deriving all kinds of value from them. Lots of people will use a search engine to research any car buying purchase, and those searches will monetize extremely well. So clearly the tax should be doubled, and the other half used for subsidizing the French car industry. Surely anybody can agree that it's for the common good to ensure that the French industrial base isn't further eroded.
abraxasz 14y ago
Duh? Why would google have to participate? If the journals don't want people reading online, why do they put content up in the first place? Then they can always ask google to no longer link to their content if that's the problem.. No, the real issue is that they don't know what to do, or are afraid to take risks and do the right thing so they try to take the money where it is. And I'm not being hypocritical, I sincerely do not see why it would be fair for google to pay the newspaper: seems to me like it's a win-win, where google gets ad-money, and the newspapers get traffic. Now if the newspapers are not capable of transforming traffic into money, that's another issue, and google isn't responsible for that..
Raphael_Amiard 14y ago
> You obviously don't know anything about the French academic system and grandes écoles. Or you are being hypocritical. Well i obviously know some, i've done two master degrees in French university, one in Computer Science and one in Sociology, and i've found the GP's post to be pretty accurate. So please feel free to post a real rebuttal, i'm ready to argument at least as to why i think french university education prepares very badly to anything practical and creative that isn't in the domain of pure academia. This for example : > are in completely different schools from the people with actual know-how , who get forced into consultancies mainly, to write Java enterprise code for the rest of their lives. is actually pretty much 95% true. When you get out with a french comp-sci degree, you are presented with the following choices (by your professors and the businesses linked to the university) : - Either go into research - Either go into very specialized industrial work (high safety embedded systems, mission critical components) - Either go into big consultancies doing Java (Cap Gemini and such) This does not arise from maliciousness, but only from the fact that those are the three main areas in which there is work for comp-sci students in France. The area of consumer oriented innovative enterprises, be them big or small, is pretty much nonexistent. The courses in my university (which is supposedly the second best french university for computer science) are quite difficult, some of them are even good (most notably in the domain of logic/semantics, programming language research and the likes), but most of them are either: - Highly theoretical, based on subsets of domains that have seen no massive practical use in decades, still being taught because they are the teacher's PHD subject. - Supposedly practical, but using outdated/horrible/both technologies. For example, i have had two introductions to web development at University, one using bash scripts and C (no kidding), by some sort of mad teacher who thought reimplementing libC with more ternaries was the way to go about life, the other using such things as JSP/Spring Framework, obviously designed to target those students who were gonna go in the "Enterprise world". Both made me want to kill myself (figuratively). On a variety of more "academic" subjects where we are actually supposed to have some experts here in France, be it systems programming, embedded systems, highly parallel programming , the quality of the courses when compared to those of top american universities (which are as of now widely available for free on the interwebs) is so low that it is really, truely depressing. This is obviously a complex problem, and there are no black and white, but if you are really able to argue that there is no truth to the statement of the GP, then you are the one who doesn't know a lot about french university, or being hypocritical.
mpyne 14y ago
> As it happens, there are companies making fortunes on internet, and their business largely depends on the contents that is created by others. This is particularly true with Google and the press industry. If you see it that way, it seems only fair that Google participate in paying the journalists producing quality content that makes people use their search engine and/or see their ads. Are you really trying to claim that Google largely depends on the content created by the press for their success? If so, wouldn't you also claim that projects which become famous solely because of link aggregators such as Reddit and HN should pay a monetary amount back to the link aggregator? Also, how do you account for the free services provided to the press industry to allow their content to be written? Does the press in France still pay sums to the Gutenberg estate and heirs? Either way even assuming your point is true, the response should be much simpler: If the journalist content is really that valuable to Google then have the publisher negotiate with Google directly for payment, or remove their content from Google and make them suffer.
sageikosa 14y ago
> I hope this makes the intention clearer to those of you who don't live in France. France: socialist. Check!
p4bl0 14y ago
Since then, this happened: http://googleblog.blogspot.fr/2013/02/google-creates-60m-digital-publishing.html http://googleblog.blogspot.fr/2013/02/google-creates-60m-dig.... Clever Google.

by p4bl0 14y ago

bitcartel 14y ago

Many US and British newspapers are behind a paywall. Are any French newspapers trying this? What have their results been like?

outside1234 14y ago

That is just crazy. If the papers need to raise money to pay journalists, they should put up paywalls. This is working at the New York Times, so why not in France?

jsnell 14y ago

I hear the automakers are also really suffering. And Google is deriving all kinds of value from them. Lots of people will use a search engine to research any car buying purchase, and those searches will monetize extremely well. So clearly the tax should be doubled, and the other half used for subsidizing the French car industry. Surely anybody can agree that it's for the common good to ensure that the French industrial base isn't further eroded.

abraxasz 14y ago

Duh? Why would google have to participate? If the journals don't want people reading online, why do they put content up in the first place? Then they can always ask google to no longer link to their content if that's the problem.. No, the real issue is that they don't know what to do, or are afraid to take risks and do the right thing so they try to take the money where it is. And I'm not being hypocritical, I sincerely do not see why it would be fair for google to pay the newspaper: seems to me like it's a win-win, where google gets ad-money, and the newspapers get traffic. Now if the newspapers are not capable of transforming traffic into money, that's another issue, and google isn't responsible for that..

Raphael_Amiard 14y ago

> You obviously don't know anything about the French academic system and grandes écoles. Or you are being hypocritical. Well i obviously know some, i've done two master degrees in French university, one in Computer Science and one in Sociology, and i've found the GP's post to be pretty accurate. So please feel free to post a real rebuttal, i'm ready to argument at least as to why i think french university education prepares very badly to anything practical and creative that isn't in the domain of pure academia. This for example : > are in completely different schools from the people with actual know-how , who get forced into consultancies mainly, to write Java enterprise code for the rest of their lives. is actually pretty much 95% true. When you get out with a french comp-sci degree, you are presented with the following choices (by your professors and the businesses linked to the university) : - Either go into research - Either go into very specialized industrial work (high safety embedded systems, mission critical components) - Either go into big consultancies doing Java (Cap Gemini and such) This does not arise from maliciousness, but only from the fact that those are the three main areas in which there is work for comp-sci students in France. The area of consumer oriented innovative enterprises, be them big or small, is pretty much nonexistent. The courses in my university (which is supposedly the second best french university for computer science) are quite difficult, some of them are even good (most notably in the domain of logic/semantics, programming language research and the likes), but most of them are either: - Highly theoretical, based on subsets of domains that have seen no massive practical use in decades, still being taught because they are the teacher's PHD subject. - Supposedly practical, but using outdated/horrible/both technologies. For example, i have had two introductions to web development at University, one using bash scripts and C (no kidding), by some sort of mad teacher who thought reimplementing libC with more ternaries was the way to go about life, the other using such things as JSP/Spring Framework, obviously designed to target those students who were gonna go in the "Enterprise world". Both made me want to kill myself (figuratively). On a variety of more "academic" subjects where we are actually supposed to have some experts here in France, be it systems programming, embedded systems, highly parallel programming , the quality of the courses when compared to those of top american universities (which are as of now widely available for free on the interwebs) is so low that it is really, truely depressing. This is obviously a complex problem, and there are no black and white, but if you are really able to argue that there is no truth to the statement of the GP, then you are the one who doesn't know a lot about french university, or being hypocritical.

mpyne 14y ago

> As it happens, there are companies making fortunes on internet, and their business largely depends on the contents that is created by others. This is particularly true with Google and the press industry. If you see it that way, it seems only fair that Google participate in paying the journalists producing quality content that makes people use their search engine and/or see their ads. Are you really trying to claim that Google largely depends on the content created by the press for their success? If so, wouldn't you also claim that projects which become famous solely because of link aggregators such as Reddit and HN should pay a monetary amount back to the link aggregator? Also, how do you account for the free services provided to the press industry to allow their content to be written? Does the press in France still pay sums to the Gutenberg estate and heirs? Either way even assuming your point is true, the response should be much simpler: If the journalist content is really that valuable to Google then have the publisher negotiate with Google directly for payment, or remove their content from Google and make them suffer.

sageikosa 14y ago

> I hope this makes the intention clearer to those of you who don't live in France. France: socialist. Check!

p4bl0 14y ago

Since then, this happened: http://googleblog.blogspot.fr/2013/02/google-creates-60m-digital-publishing.html http://googleblog.blogspot.fr/2013/02/google-creates-60m-dig.... Clever Google.