Sigh, the French...

You think that all is well in the world on a snowy afternoon, and then you hear a story like this. Louis Vuitton (LV) has successfully sued Google because when people search for "Louis Vuitton," Google's AdSearch comes up with sponsored ads for LV's competitors, and "Sending Internet users to these other sites made it seem as if their products were Louis Vuitton, when in fact they were fakes."

The lawsuit is so absurd that I don't even know where to begin. First of all, no one expects that sponsored ads will be exactly what one is searching for--after all, the ad for Satellite Radio that came up when I just searched for Rufus Wainwright isn't Rufus Wainwright. And if they do expect that, the're naive.

Second, I know for a fact that France lets other, less prominent companies, do similar targeted advertising. In the US, if you buy Jif peanut butter, you might get a coupon for Skippy, through the Checkout Coupon program (the red and white coupons) run by Catalina Marketing Corp. This program exists in France--completely legally, I might add--and I have a feeling that the French gov't is just picking on Google.

Third, since when does LV get to determine what Google can or cannot do when people use its proprietary service? Why shouldn't Google be able to do whatever it wants when people search for "Louis Vuitton"? When people search Google, they may expect honest results, but Google isn't required to give them to them. Louis Vuitton doesn't own every use of those two words on the internet, and the US courts (thankfully) don't care what comes up on Google Ads in such a case. What type of warped system would think this is a violation of copyright?

The answer is, a system in which the concept of "freedom" is very different from ours. A perfect example of this: In France, the Church of Scientology sued because kiosks (the ubiquitous peddlers of magazines and newspapers) wouldn't sell its publications, saying that this "violated their freedom of speech." They almost won. That's right, in France, you violate freedom of speech when you don't sell someone else's works, whereas in the US you can choose to sell or not to sell any book or magazine you want.

This absurd government meddling in business--which, I know, I should expect from France--is infuriating for three reasons: 1) it's so clearly detrimental to any sense of a good business model and the revival of lagging European economies, 2) it's symptomatic of a huge difference in the conception of the relationship between individual and state that so few people understand, 3) it's given rise to specious new ways in which companies can supposedly "violate rights."

These heinous, poorly-conceived and anti-capitalist ideas inevitably spread to the United States, and, living in the People's Republic of Hyde Park, I inevitably have to hear about them and defend big business. This, in turn, makes me a Big Bad Republican in most eyes, something I'm trying very hard not to be these days (mostly because of the Big Bad Federal Marriage Amendment). So here's hoping that Google wins on appeal, because without France, I'll have nowhere to go once the FMA finally passes... Or if nothing else, can't we at least get a Libertarian Party that I wouldn't be ashamed to be a member of?

*Disclosures: The author loves France more than you know. The college education of this author was funded in part by stock options in Catalina Marketing Corp. Blogger and gmail, which the author uses extensively, and which are used to publish this blog, are both Google products. The author does not, however, have any strong feelings on Louis Vuitton.