GeekLawyer’s Blog

Geeklawyer had blethered before about Apple and its self-serving attitude to copyright infringement: they will enable you to engage in it to the extent it serves its own interests: its own digital rights management (DRM) technology is not very secure and allows for easy circumvention, as Real have found, but it doesn’t do much about it. However if you infringe their rights in their DRM, well, oh dear that’s an entirely different matter. And Apple have soared to market dominance. The French have taken some umbrage at this Anglo-Saxon techno-imperialism.

The Washington post reports the French angle on this: disgruntled froggies who can’t transfer music from one device to another. The usual stuff and all entirely correct of course.

No, what tickled Geeklawyer’s funny bone was not the substance of the interoperability complaints but the tone. One could practically hear the reporter saying to himself “how can I put ‘cheese eating surrender monkeys’ in here?”, or “freedom [what]?”. The piece was not entirely one sided but most of the jibes remained with an American slant and without riposte. Tosh such as;

“The idea in France is to protect consumers, but in the U.S., it would be seen as short-term protection, because if you are forced to share the technology you developed with others, that stifles the incentives to innovate and invest,” said [some pro free market mouthpiece] “In France, there is a tendency to protect competitors, not just competition. It’s very short-sighted.”

“in France, it is the state which is responsible for great technical innovations, and … that in particular, you should not let America monopolize the technologies of the future.”

France supports the European Union’s efforts to strip the United States of its effective technical control of the Internet. Etc. etc.

One imagines Cheney and Rumsfeld planning the liberation of France from the ghastly French at this very moment: WMD & state sponsored IT terrorism speeches in the works no doubt.