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

Found?

[sexconker]

Google wasn't found guilty. They were openly, admittedly, unabashedly guilty of digitizing and putting up excerpts of books they did not hold ANY copyright to.

They only thing that happened was that the court decided the this law is valid even for a mega corp like Google.

THAT, my friends, is the real shocker.

And all you Googlebots can bitch about the law all you want, that's fine. Get the laws changed (in France, here, wherever). But Google brazenly did shit that was completely illegal. I am glad they got hit for it.

Corporations should NOT be above the law.

Re:Found?

[Overzeetop]

I absolutely agree, sort of. What this will likely do, however, is force a settlement between Google and the French publisher for the rights...and I don't think it will go in the publishers favor.

See, Google has gotten us addicted to information. Easy searching. The world at our fingertips. What happens when Google pulls the plug on all French language sites, citing the French interpretation of the right to excerpt for search reasons? People are going to have a fit over it. Somebody is going to have to give, and I suspect France is a relatively small proportion of Google's revenue - at least compared to Google's share of the French search engine mindshare.

Of course, they won't be all confrontational like that - they'll be far more political. I don't see Google actually "losing".

Re:Found?

[fermion]

It would seem better we had a compulsory license fee on book so that google, or whomever, could pay a fee for unit of book copied/scanned/duplicated. Then there would be a fee for each page served.

But this is not the case, and google is testing how far it can push the copyright laws to enhance it's business position. Many firms do this. MS did this. I don't like Google doing this because they are not trying to open information. Rather, they are trying to control information so that eyeballs have to view ads brokered by Google.

However, my like or dislike is not relevant. What is relevant is that google is the method many people use to find information. What is relevant is that France is a tiny little country with a language that diminishing number of people speak, and diminishing influence. Many schools in the US are more likely to teach Russian or German or Japanese rather than French. There was a time when France actively tried to fight this negative position by liberally distributing french material. It's seems that they have now given up and will become a country just go to for vacation, like Jamaica.

Make sense

[0xABADC0DA]

Google makes unauthorized copies of people's work to store in their servers, in some way similar to how Psystar is found guilty of making unauthorized copies of Mac OS X when it loads it into memory.

Then Google makes money hand over fist from it by selling search results/ads and the people producing the content get nothing or -at best- a very tiny fraction of the income. 'Take from the rich and keep for our own rich selves' sounds a lot like 'do evil' to me.

If your content shows up in Google's results and they make any money off it, then you as the creator of that content should get a portion of that money. Otherwise why do we have copyright laws at all? In a fair world, google and bing should need to set up accounts for each website and pay back a portion of their revenue each time that site's contents appears in a search result with ads in it.

Re:Make sense

[Xyrus]

If your content shows up in Google's results and they make any money off it, then you as the creator of that content should get a portion of that money.

You are. You're getting free advertising. If you want even better advertising, you can pay more for it. But only the utterly delusional/idiotic would think that they are getting NOTHING from having Google link to their content.

Otherwise why do we have copyright laws at all?

Originally? Or now?

The original copyright laws were to grant the author a monopoly for a fixed period of time to reward them for their works. Now, copyright laws are used to create a perpetual monopoly and act as cultural sledgehammer.

Look, if you want to be a complete jackass and prevent any search engines for indexing your content, then lock your precious copyrighted materials behind a paywall. Use robots.txt. Make requests to have your content removed. But I'll bet you dollars to dog nuts that you're shooting yourself in the ass by doing so. These days, if it doesn't come up in a search engine IT DOES NOT EXIST.

In a fair world, google and bing should need to set up accounts for each website and pay back a portion of their revenue each time that site's contents appears in a search result with ads in it

In a fair world, you should be on your knees thanking the gods of technology and software that something like Google even exists to link your content to the outside world FOR FREE. You are getting advertisement FOR FREE. Thousands, if not millions of people who would never know you're content existed will know it does FOR FREE. You are getting worldwide exposure FOR FREE.

So choose. Pay for that exposure out of you're own pocket, or have search engines like Google do it FOR FREE.

~X~

Now if only Sarkozy would be found guilty.

[Hurricane78]

After all he violated his own laws 3 times, and now, according to his own laws, should be thrown off the Internet.

He even did it with intent. As he asked the media industry first, then they denied the request, but then he used it anyway.

Is long as Sarkozy is not behind bars and off the net, this whole thing is a farce.

War of the cultures

[AlexBirch]

France just lost another major battle for the war of the cultures. If Google stays away from all of the copyrighted material in French, that means the world would be more apt to find Victor Hugo in English than in French. I'm grateful that for the most part, the internet is English territory (/. is a great example).

It's just sad to see the French surrender yet another battle.

Re:Really impressive

[dropadrop]

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.

I've been to France quite often, and on most of my visits I did not speak a word of French. I was never subject to any ridicule, but I never expected anyone to speak more English or Finnish then I spoke French. I understand somebody could have bad luck and meet an asshole, but if everybody you meet are assholes you should look in the mirror for a cause.

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!

My findings with modern young french people is that most of them do actually speak some English (mind you this is just Paris I'm talking about). However they are very ashamed to try as they are very bad at it. I don't know if it's really due to the way most native French speaking people play with words in a way you can't really do with English and it makes their attempts feel even worse, but that's the feeling I got. Anyway, I've found that after making a total fool out of yourself trying to communicate with your hands and bad french almost everybody suddenly speaks English...