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  • No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization
  • J. G. Matthews
No Trespassing: Authorship, Intellectual Property Rights, and the Boundaries of Globalization. By Eva Hemmungs Wirtén . Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004. xii, 224 pp. $50.00. ISBN 0-8020-8835-X.

When the Internet's "true history" comes to be written, libraries will wish they knew how foreigners had learned it.

Any technique is culture-bound at its origins. Protests always are that a new technology is "value-free." Yet we all encountered exceptions once the public Internet was launched in 1992–93. We grappled with great differences in receptivity to Internet charms, between users of different ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, occupations, and education levels.

The Internet quickly outpaced our local skepticisms. Within very few years it was international, and a new crew of users descended. Initial worries—over multilingual homepages and helpscreens on operating manuals—moved to system design and cultural differences and even legal differences on thorny areas such as copyright, taxation, alcohol and tobacco, and Nazi memorabilia sales. What was good for Peoria was not necessarily good for America, we discovered, and what was good for America was not necessarily good for the entire globe.

Many now study this international aspect of digital information. Development and marketing teams inside all software, hardware, and systems firms puzzle over such problems. Multinational and transnational solutions are sought from computer science programs on campuses everywhere. Policy makers and legions of lawyers try to tweak antiquated concepts such as "intellectual property" to accommodate the limitless international digital information sphere.

It is most useful to view such questions directly, from the foreign user's point of view. This book is presented far from the Internet's U.S. origins: in a non-Anglophone linguistic and cultural setting, as most such settings and locations will be.

The book discusses how users and librarians function inside French public libraries and how they function in using the Internet. The role of public authorities, of great importance in French life, is presented. The software, hardware, systems, and particularly the labor force all are explained. Youth unemployment is of great concern in France now as it is elsewhere in the non-U.S. world. The book discusses "youth employees," an innovative source of enthusiastic Internet trainers.

The different Internet usages provided by a French public library are outlined. The Internet is a focal point there for conferences and exhibitions and other activities: "virtual" exhibits, workshops, and collections, including CDs and other digital items, can all grow from a library Internet investment.The "spinoff" and "add-on" aspects of the acquisition could interest people curious about financial differences overseas.

Website design, too, can be different. The book considers online cataloging and its addition to a library website, subjects simply assumed now in any U.S. setting. The book can suggest to a researcher that overseas such notions are not to be taken for granted.

Regarding digital libraries, copyright and cultural patrimony are primary in a French public library, while U.S. public librarians consider "access" to be the primary goal. Does this indicate deeper cultural differences separating the United States from this one foreign culture? This book is raw material for such a study: an original resource, showing the researcher how one set of "foreigners" thinks about such things.

There is an extensive bibliography and a useful lexicon: "DSL" in France is "ADSL," "security software" is pare-feu, public-access catalogs there meet online [End Page 290] systems via a liaison dynamique. A guide to abbreviations is provided, since the French answer to American slang is acronyms—just as U.S. techspeak "hits a home run" too often for foreign speakers, so the French say, "The DLL decided the DRAC should adopt DSI for their ECM project at the ENSSIB . . ." To each culture its own linguistic weaknesses, then.

Schools of information, computer science, and librarianship and any class involving the French or the French language will benefit from books like this. So will any program in cross-cultural studies and the "scaling up" of civilizations to our brave, new, fully globalized digital information world.

All these disciplines will need some understanding of...

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