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?

[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.

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.