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."

Comments

I don't get it

[vectorious]

I would have thought that extracts of books on Google would be the best possible advertising that you could have for a book - you do a search, and find a useful extract from a book, naturally you want to know more, but google won't give you any more, so you follow the handy advertising link at the side and buy it off Amazon - everyone wins.

I cannot believe that google extracts are in any way damaging book sales, and therefore causing harm to the authors or publishers.

So what are they complaining about?

Re:I don't get it

[Hatta]

French publishers have bit the hand that feeds them. The obvious solution is for Google to no longer digitize French books, and laugh as people buy less of them.

Re:I don't get it

[nacturation]

The effectiveness of a particular promotional channel is irrelevant if the act itself is illegal.

Really impressive

[bdunogier]

Hi ! French / Frog / Egg eater (pick the one you like the most) here :) While I'm also a bit annoyed by this decision, they still have a point... but this is not what I wanna debate here. Even though I try to get the funny parts of most comments here, I am still extremely impressed by how you guys can look down on people you probably haven't ever spoke with (frenchies I mean), probably based on what you can see/read in the medias. Yes, most frenchies do look down on you the same way, but as slashdot users, who pretend to be part of the "internet revolution", which as far as I see it should provide all of us with accurate, real information standard, main stream media wouldn't provide us with. Really ironic. And yes, I do think the same about a good proportion of my fellow frenchies. No offense indended here, though.

Re:Really impressive

[Locke2005]

1) It hard to "speak with people" who insist that everyone speak perfect French or be subject ridicule, especially when you don't speak French.
2) From what I have heard, the country French are a very hospitable people, warm and willing to share their culture with the world. It is really only the Parisians that have a (deserved) reputation for being arrogant. Unfortunately, Paris is the only part of France that most people ever visit.
3) The Quebecois have earned some degree of disrespect since their insistence on the use of French goes far beyond "bi-lingualism" and may be regarded by some as discriminating against the majority English-speaking Canadians.
In general, France was once a big global superpower; France was once the center for tecnology, and French was the "Lingua Franca" used in diplomacy throughout the world. The French appear more than a little pissed off that this is no longer true. However, this just gives us a preview of the kind of attitude we will be getting from the Americans in a few years when China becomes the economic and technological center of the world. If you thought the French were acting like arrogant assholes before, just wait 'til you see what the Americans act like!

Re:Really impressive

[thetoadwarrior]

1) It hard to "speak with people" who insist that everyone speak perfect French or be subject ridicule, especially when you don't speak French.

You mean like the numerous Americans and English who mock immigrants who don't speak perfect English even though the immigrant knows two or three languages and the native English speaker can only (if lucky) manage one?

Re:Yup

[Grishnakh]

The US does deserve the honor of creating a very good form of government, way back in the late 1700s when Europe was still under the rule of monarchs. Sure, these days every decent country has some sort of Constitutional Republic, but back then it was a downright revolutionary concept. Even better, our form of government has survived ever since the ratification of the Constitution in the 1780s. Most other industrialized nations can't claim to have a form of government that's lasted as long and been so stable; they've all been interrupted by dictatorships (Spain, Germany, Italy), occupations by invaders (Poland, France, Belgium), had a complete change of government (Japan, China), etc. The closest would probably be Great Britain, which instead of some big unheaval like those others, slowly morphed from an absolute monarchy, to a monarchy with a Parliament, to a Parliamentary democracy with a monarch that's nothing but a figurehead.

Unfortunately, while what the USA's founders created was revolutionary and great, 230+ years of time and massive expansion and all kinds of social changes and upheavals have corrupted it greatly, and now it's not working so well and appears to be utterly corrupt at most levels.

surrender....

[Savage-Rabbit]

True, as the French surrendered (again) before we became fully engaged there. Prior to their (typical) surrender we helped back them in terms of money and troops. Yet even with the quagmire that sadly enough was Vietnam I don't think it's comparable to the poor choices that Nappy made back in the day...

Yeah, It's not like the USA had to haul ass out of Vietnam with it's tail between it's .... uh... oh wait it did.... If there is one thing we learned from Vietnam (at least the ones of us that haven't been brainwashed with an overdose of extreme right wing ideology) it's that not all problems on this earth can be solved with the lavish over-application of obscene amounts of firepower. Maybe one day you will wake up and realize that the world is not a Rambo movie.... and that line about the French and surrender is getting really old and very tired. You people seem to find it awful easy to forget that it was French money, French guns and French ships that picked your revolution up out of the N-American mud at a time when the British army was wiping the floor with George Washington and his continentals and eventually brought you your independence. At the end thousands of their soldiers and sailors proved instrumental in that process as well. Apparently French troops outnumbered the Americans at at their key victory, the famous siege of Siege of Yorktown.