Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Google Found Guilty of French Copyright Infringement

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the slap-on-the-wrist dept.

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."

1 of 254 comments (clear)

  1. Make NO sense by StevenMaurer · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    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.