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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."
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.
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.