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Google Found Guilty of French Copyright Infringement
adeelarshad82 writes "A Paris court on Friday found Google guilty of violating copyright by digitizing books and putting extracts online, following a legal challenge by major French publishers. The court found against Google after the La Martiniere group, which controls the highbrow Editions du Seuil publishing house, argued that publishers and authors were losing out in the latest stage of the digital revolution."
Cue all the Americans whining about those Europeans daring to stand in the way of their corporate imperialism.
Serves America right for being a bunch of stupid, ignorant, greedy, power-mad thugs who will consume each other from the inside.
Soon America will be just a bunch of vacation property for rich Arabs and Chinamen. The only jobs left will be service jobs which cater to said foreigners. The education system will crumble under its own top-heavy weight while mosques which rival the largest megachurches will pop up everywhere. The American military, continuing to wage unpopular wars, will exhaust its resources and become mercenaries for hire waging wars-by-proxy in behalf of the highest bidders. The Americans' sons and daughters will be shining the shoes and washing the dishes of the very people that their proud parents and grandparents fought. Protesters, kooks, and other loudmouths will be silenced permanently by the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA's clandestine service.
I am an American and proud patriot, but I'll be long-gone before any of the above happens. Noorwegen, hier kom ik!
The difference is "Fair Use".
The Doctrine of Fair Use states that very small excerpts of a copyrighted work may be used for academic teaching, political commentary, and indexing.
Competition with the actual author of the work with a verbatim copy, as in the Psystar case, is clearly not fair use.
This ruling, upholding the French version of the DMCA (except far more draconian), essentially says that you can sue a Phone Book company for putting the copyrighted name of your business in their phone book. It also makes programming open/free software into a "suicide mission". France is going to suffer decreased competition from these laws, and likely stunt their intellectual services economy as a result.
Maybe it's not the same degree of mistake as Vietnam and Iraq that the French warned Americans against, but it will hurt them economically in the long run quite badly.