The first French-language Kindle is the non-touch model just released in the U.S., available for €99.00. It offers a 600x800, 6-inch screen with 1.25GB of internal storage. The release date is October 14.

"French customers are passionate about books and reading, and just as we've seen in the US, UK and Germany, we believe they will love reading on Kindle," said Greg Greeley, vice president, Amazon European Retail. "We are excited to bring our first French-language Kindle and our new Kindle store to millions of Amazon.fr customers."

There is no "special offers" discount on this model as there is for the English version. Amazon released this new Kindle model for $79 in the U.S. with ads that display on the sleep screen. Without the ads, the U.S. version is $109.

Amazon also released the Kindle Touch and the new Kindle Fire tablet on September 28. No French release for these new models has been announced.

Agreement in France, Court Case in German

One of the countries where YouTube has not been able to reach an agreement yet is Germany. There, according to Bloomberg, the music rights collection agency GEMA is about to challenge Google in the Regional Court of Hamburg after talks between the two organizations broke down earlier this year. The Germany collection agency wants to prevent YouTube from displaying 75 compositions on its site.

Over the years, the relationship between GEMA and YouTube has been rather tumultuous and it doesn't look like Google will be able to reach an agreement there anytime soon. Earlier this year, for example, negotiations between the two organizations broke down when GEMA asked YouTube to remove 600 videos from its service. Last year, YouTube blocked access to all GEMA-licensed music on its German site for a while after the two organizations couldn't agree on a new fee structure and just a few weeks ago, a German court also ruled that YouTube has to pay damages to classical crossover soprano Sarah Brightman.

It is important for an American audience to understand that we have nothing like the First Amendment in France, and that freedom of speech is not granted in every circumstance; any kind of hate speech, for example, is illegal. Applying censorship to the Web to make it compliant with French laws would eventually censor millions of websites (not to mention lead to blind copyright enforcement).

The recently leaked report is supposed to guide the UMP, the country's ruling party, but politics in France are very fuzzy right now when it comes to the Internet.

September will likely see the French Senate approve the LOPPSI law, which allows for net censorship. Child pornography is ostensibly the target, just like in Australia, but it's already expanding to other kind of content, despite promises made by the State Secretary for Digital Economy made during the debate last January.

Other freedom-frightening bills could be on their way as well. UMP Senator Jean-Louis Masson is pushing for a piece of legislation that would make it mandatory for bloggers to register their identity before being allowed to express themselves online. UMP Senator Jean-René Lecerf wants new French ID cards to be embedded with a chip so that connecting to the Internet would be - according to his plan - impossible without proper identification.

Caught between democracy and the free market, the constitution is coming into direct conflict with the digital age. France is at a crossroads.

Net Neutrality and the 2012 Elections

Net neutrality's fate is now in the hands of a more progressive group of MPs who will start working on the bill in a few weeks. Lionel Tardy is among the very few in the right-wing UMP party who net citizens hold in high esteem; he strongly opposed the HADOPI law (which targets illegal file sharing) and understands the inner mechanics of the digital age. Hervé Mariton, who recently lead a working group on ethics and online interactions, has shown some interest in ideas coming from outside the anti net neutrality lobbies. Laure de la Raudière (right), who leads the group of MPs in charge of the upcoming net neutrality bill at the Assembly, is open to new ideas and also understand the Internet and its social impacts (a very rare characteristic among French politicians).

The French National Assembly, which used to follow whatever the government proposed during the HADOPI legislation, is now aware that the opposition among net citizens is very high.

Online publications such as Numerama and PCinpact, which strongly opposed the HADOPI law from day one, have seen a huge growth in their audience the last two years. The same goes for blogs like Korben.info and ReadWriteWeb France, which are also opposed to the death of net neutrality, and who have seen a significant increase in readership in the traditional journalism and political landscapes.

MPs now realize their own elections, which will take place in 2012, could be in jeopardy if they continue on the current path, and most Internet and political spin doctors (including former presidential counselors) admit that the way the government has handled Internet issues is catastrophic and could lead to a very serious problem during the 2012 presidential election year.

Will this be enough to prevent a digital civil war between a government that sees the Internet as its main source of problems and its netizens?

If net neutrality isn't dead yet, then free enterprise and innovation is hurting, and free speech - the American way - which has been enjoyed since the beginning of the Web 2.0 era by French netizens, will follow closely behind.

Lead photo by Taramisu; second photo D.R. Laure de la Raudière.

The French government joined Germany today in recommending that its citizens switch to another browser in light of last week's admission by Microsoft that Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 all contained the same security vulnerability, in which "Internet Explorer can be caused to allow remote code execution."

As we reported on Friday, Internet security company McAfee pointed out this security vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which allowed hackers in China to attack Google, Adobe and a large number of other companies, including Yahoo and Northrop Grumman.

We contacted Microsoft's PR firm, but due to the holiday in the U.S. today, we weren't able to reach anyone inside the company. An article in The Telegraph, however, paraphrased Microsoft as having said "that the German government had over-reacted about the threat posed by the vulnerability, and that general users were not at risk."

Joe Wilcox of Beta News was not so timid, his suggestion that "it's time to stop using any version of Microsoft's browser -- IE6, IE7, IE8 and forget someday releasing IE9."

According to StatCounter, Internet Explorer still accounts for 45% of browser use in Europe, as opposed to 53% in North America and just over 55% worldwide.

While Microsoft is working on a fix for the problem, we have yet to hear of any resolution to the issue. We'll have to keep an eye on this one and see if the recommendations do anything to lessen Internet Explorer's complete and total dominance in the browser markets.

Crowdsourcing the measurement of environmental data could make it possible to create a real-time map of current ozone levels, for example. Through the Citypulse platform, the Green Watch project wants to make this data available for free. Citypulse was developed by the members of Citu, a group of French university labs, startups and government organizations.

How Do You Convince People to Wear These?

Of course, in order to turn this project into a commercial success, the developers would first have to persuade users to buy these devices for completely altruistic reasons. The prototype is also rather bulky. Also, as wrist watches are slowly being displaced by mobile phones, the developers will have to give users a good reason to wear a watch again. Air quality sensors, after all, don't work very well in trouser pockets.

Disclosure: The author met with the Green Watch team during a lunch that was sponsored by Cap Digital and Invest in France.

Dartmouth computer science professor and forensic imaging specialist Hany Farid is convinced that photo manipulation isn't just a 20th century phenomenon as employed in a Polish Microsoft ad last month, but rather something that has existed since at least the 1860's. He cites an image of Lincoln as being a composite of the President and of another politician's body.

Says Farid in a recent issue of the IEEE Spectrum, "Even as experts continue to develop techniques for exposing photographic frauds, new techniques for creating better and harder-to-detect fakes are also evolving. As in the battle against spam and computer viruses, it seems inevitable that the arms race between the forger and the forensic analyst will continue to escalate, with no clear victor."

Farid points to abnormalities in quantization (or image compression) and multiple points of light as telltale signs of image tampering. As services like Picnik and Fotoflexer continue to power the editing features in common photo sharing sites like Flickr, Photobucket and Picasa, it will be interesting to see how many forgeries are actually detected should the law pass.

Photo Credit: Art Comments (Lead Image), Hany Farid's "Photo Tampering Through History" (Inset)

English is the de facto lingua franca of global business (pardon the Latin). If you want to do business globally, you have to be able to speak and write English. But most of the world's conversations occur in other languages. We want ReadWriteWeb to be a venue for conversations about innovation not just in English but in all major languages. We want to hear stories about innovation in those languages by people who live and work in those countries. We also want some of those stories to be translated back into English for a global audience - English serving as the hub, as it were.

Our Trailblazing Site in France

ReadWriteWeb France is blazing a trail that we want to follow into other countries. Web innovators in France can now read a selection of posts from ReadWriteWeb in French. Fabrice Epelboin and his team translate ReadWriteWeb posts into French, localize the stories, adding bits that make them relevant to France, and create new stories specific to France. Some of these stories are clearly important to readers outside of France, and we will be bringing these to our global audience. One example is Fabrice's crusade against the Hadopi law. The law is specific to France, but the issues are global, and other governments are working on similar issues that could have alarming outcomes. We hope that ReadWriteWeb becomes both a local and global voice on issues such as this.

5 Other Country Versions in the Pipeline

Versions of ReadWriteWeb are currently being created for:

• China
• Korea
• Spain
• Holland
• Brazil

In each country, we are working with an entrepreneur who is passionate about Web technology.

These countries are all large economies. We already know how many people from these countries read our content in English. Many more will read and engage if the content is in their local language.

Engagement is critical. Reading is easier than writing. Many people are comfortable reading a post in a foreign language: even if they don't understand everything, they at least get critical information that is not available in their native language. But writing a comment and engaging in a conversation is much harder in a foreign language.

Why We Naturally Take a Global View

Many people assume, looking at our content, that ReadWriteWeb is based in Silicon Valley. We are not. We do have writers in the Valley, and we congregate there frequently for major events. But ReadWriteWeb's founder and editor, Richard MacManus, is based in New Zealand. Our COO, Bernard Lunn, is based in New York but is a Brit who was born in Berlin and has lived and worked all around the world. We are a networked business, with no single location, using the online tools that we write about to run our business. So viewing anywhere in the world as a good place to report from and not regarding any place as "foreign" comes natural to us.

RWW France will be covering the Web 2.0 Expo Berlin 2008 next week and they have tickets to give away if you're one of our European readers.

Romain gave us some background on why RWW France was created and what they plan to do with the site, along with profiles of the team:

"ReadWriteWeb France was started with the purpose of providing French people another way to read about the web and learn from it. We intend to make the French version not just a translation of the ReadWriteWeb website, but to add to it the French point of view and market knowledge of web experts who have joined the French team - as well as original content to highlight and analyze what's currently happening in Europe, starting with the Web 2.0 Expo Berlin coverage next week.

The French team includes Fabrice Epelboin, entrepreneur and partner at Aladia (branding & strategic consulting shop) and social web consultant at Kantik.com; Damien Douani, Concept & Business Development Manager at Orange / Innovation department - explocentre; Jeremie Moritz, Business Manager Southern Europe - Metaboli (online content distribution); and Charles Liebert, Digital & Interactiv Marketing Manager at Orange Vallée as an occasional author."

Welcome Romain and team, thanks for translating us into French and we look forward to reading your original content (via Google Translate probably).

p.s. Kudos to eagle-eyed Techcrunch France writer Ouriel Ohayon, who spotted RWW France as soon as it began posting.