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

LMAO this is BS

[robinstar1574]

Then again, they are the Idiot stupide.

Re:LMAO this is BS

[ecbpro]

To protect France from what? Nonexisting WMDs? Some OBL in a cave? I see... You know they might not let you fly over their country because they happen to be a sovereign country and it is their right. How often are foreign bombers allowed to fly over US territory?

Re:LMAO this is BS

[koxkoxkox]

That's nice and all to link to Wikipedia, but maybe you should read the articles before ... I will help you :
* there isn't any american air bases in France. It was decided by De Gaulle quite a long time ago : I quote the article linked in your post "On 23 October 1967, all foreign flags were furled and after 17 years all NATO forces departed France."
* France doesn't have any specialized bomber, but now a lot of planes can play the role : for example the Mirage 2000 is a multirole fighter.

Yeah, but it's France....

[Itninja]

Google should fight. Or, better yet, just threaten to fight. If the past is any indication, the French will surrender.

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[Monkeedude1212]

Be careful though - they have had some amazing military strategists in the past, and they are a bit overdue in that department, so it could happen again one day soon.

The LAST thing I need is France Attacking the States, Occupying Canada, and then forcing us to put Eggs on our pizzas.

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[Aardpig]

Yep, same as the US going into Indochina after someone had warned them of a quagmire. Now who was it who warned them? Oh yes, the French!

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[Jah-Wren Ryel]

Don't worry, the french government is too occupied looking good to make war.

Sure about that? They are nearly tied with the UK for 2nd largest arms manufacturer in the world.

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[Arancaytar]

Except that before Napoleon even shared a border with Russia, he had to own most of Europe. I can see how the geographical details might be lost on Americans, though.

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[gregarican]

Uhhh....how does extending an empire have anything to do with borders? After all England extended their empire to faraway places they didn't directly border. Maybe I'm missing something though, since I'm just a dumb American who knows nothing about geography. But I am real good at gazintas and cipherin' (Beverly Hillbillies drop)...

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[cntThnkofAname]

Wooo look at me I'm jumping on the bash the French bandwagon!

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[ivucica]

Is it easier to conquer faraway primitive places, or your European neighbors who are at the same tech level as you are?

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[SeeSchloss]

The thing is, if all there is between you and the place you want to invade is water, you can just sail to the place. If between you and the place you want to invade are a bunch of hostile countries, you have to own them first.

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[Grishnakh]

Napoleon was a great strategist earlier on, that was how he defeated all the other European powers. But I guess he went a little nuts at the end.

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[ravenshrike]

The lesson learned by Vietnam is to take the exact opposite stance on Foreign Policy as the French. Had we to the French to STFU and get out of Vietnam after WWII, there's a chance Vietnam would be a capitalist system today.

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[techno-vampire]

and then forcing us to put Eggs on our pizzas.

Have you ever tried putting some eggs on a pizza just before it goes into the oven? If not you should; it's great!

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[Monkeedude1212]

I refuse. There are some things an Egg is good for. Pizza is not one of them.

No, this is not my opinion, this is scientific FACT. Don't make me cite a source.

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[Ian Alexander]

It's all about troop movement. Where did England colonize? America, India, and East Africa. All accessible via sea-routes. And for the more inconveniently-located colonies (East Africa) it was a neat coincidence that they weren't all that technologically advanced or well-organized, so it's not like they exactly needed many troops.

But getting troops to Russia is a bit of a tough nut to crack when you're in France, especially when the Black Sea route is carved up between Turks and Russians, and the northerly sea-route just sucks ass all-around. Pretty much the best way to invade Russia (not that there's any good way to do it: but probably the least-worst) from France is overland, and that means you have all of Europe to wade through. And countries are notorious for not being all that excited about just letting foreign troops waltz right through.

Though it's not exactly like Napoleon started his campaigns with the intent of conquering Russia; he got drunk with power and success after conquering or bringing under his influence most of Europe, and, realizing the troop-movement problem was solved and always being game for bringing more land under his direct control, figured Russia might make a good addition to the French empire.

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[hazem]

Have you ever tried putting some eggs on a pizza just before it goes into the oven?

That might be okay - however, what I got in Paris was a raw egg cracked over the pizza AFTER it came out of the oven. I found that very disappointing. Though the the waiter may have been playing a prank, as he seemed put out that I already knew to ask for a carafe of water (since "I'd like some water" defaults to an expensive bottled water in most places).

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[twotailakitsune]

England being the greatest sea power up to World War 1/2 may have some thing to do with they colonizing.

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[Fulminata]

The French do not deserve the reputation for military ineptitude that Americans like to give them, but it was the other way around in Indochina. The US warned the French not to go back into Vietnam following WWII, but French national pride caused them to do so anyway in an effort to restore the prestige they felt they'd lost in the war.

The US then backed the French play, going so far as to reject Ho Chi Minh's request for aid after his having issued a declaration of independence partly modeled on our own. With the global situation rapidly settling into a bipolar state, the Vietnamese independence movement was left with no choice but to seek help from the other camp and became a Communist movement.

When the French pulled out, they may have indeed warned the US of the situation, but by that time preventing the supposed domino effect had become the foundation of US foreign policy, and our participation in some way or another was pretty much inevitable.

So, while the poster you were responding to has a laughably imbalanced view of Napoleon's achievements (the man's way of waging war was distilled into a set of doctrines that still form part of the foundation of western military thinking), the example you used to counter him with was an unfortunate one.

Re:Yeah, but it's France....

[TheRaven64]

He was a much better tactician than a strategist. When he evaluated his generals, he didn't ask if they were skilful, he asked if they were lucky, which means were they good at taking advantage of opportunities, not were they good at creating them. In Europe, he had the opportunity to take advantage of obsolete tactics by his opponents. In Russia, he didn't have this advantage because his forces never really engaged the Russian army, only the Russian weather and the Russian weather doesn't make mistakes.

Re:Still better than the CRIA

[Anonymous Coward]

This seems to me an even better way for them to lose out on the "internet revolution"!

_Some_ US authors and publishers

[John Hasler]

...It agreed to a settlement with US authors and publishers...

It agreed to a settlement with some US authors and publishers. Most authors were not involved.

Re:_Some_ US authors and publishers

[Shagg]

It agreed to a settlement with some US authors

I think there were 7, or something like that.

Of course, last I heard the settlement agreement was thrown out and is being rewritten.

Re:_Some_ US authors and publishers

[TheRaven64]

Not exactly. I have a book published in the USA, so I was recently informed that I was part of this lawsuit. Because it was granted class status, you have to explicitly opt out not to be considered part of the class, so most authors were involved, they just didn't give more than their implicit consent to be involved.

So....

[MickyTheIdiot]

Time to go after book reviewers next?

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

[Monkeedude1212]

So what are they complaining about?

I'm not sure, but I think one of the extracts included something about Snape killing Dumbledore.

The French were quite upset.

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

[wizardforce]

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?

I would imagine that an only exception to this would be if the book wasn't worth buying in the first place. In that case, an excerpt may very well dissuade someone from buying the book.

Re:I don't get it

[Coren22]

Maybe it allows people to see how awful the writing of the author is? Not that I can write, but if the author is truly bad, it would probably show in an excerpt.

Re:I don't get it

[nacturation]

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

Re:I don't get it

[Coren22]

HOW COULD YOU!? I just can't believe you would say that, I thought it was Harry in the library with the candle stick..

Re:I don't get it

[SeeSchloss]

Yeah, the French will massively start reading books in English if they don't find extracts digitised by Google on the interweb.

Or not. Maybe they'll just go to the library, or bookstore, or amazon.fr, or fnac.fr, or any other place where they can already find this.

Re:I don't get it

[ravenshrike]

They overstepped the bounds of the latest French copyright law. The one that makes the US DMCA look fuzzy and friendly.

Re:I don't get it

[rtb61]

That of course was not the way it was working. In most cases people where only interested in the bit of information they were after. So do the search, find the paragraph and you have your answer, no need to buy the whole bloody way overpriced textbook. Now this sounds bigger than it really was, often the paragraph rarely answered you full question, however it did reinforce the habit in searching the internet to find your answers and never buying text books (the answer you seek is always somewhere on the internet you just have to find it).

Now if you where writing something you could find your accurate answers say on Wikipedia, use them and then use google book search to find reference able quotes to justify those answers and yeah, you only need the one paragraph, page number, book and author and year of publishing (all based upon your referencing style). Of course that is also becoming largely redundant as more quality, referenced and open information sources are becoming available online, all of course self published.

Hmm, self publishing, it is cheap, it is open, it is really useful across the board (writers as proof of skills, readers for answering questions and industry to demonstrate expertise and government to inform their citizens) and of course it totally fucks over existing profit bloated middle man for profit publishers. Face it, corporate publishers are 20th century dinosaurs, they should just STFU and die already, they are not needed any more and no longer provide any real benefit in the 21st century internet age.

Re:Gosh, it wouldn't parallel the way the US...

[zach_the_lizard]

Don't like it when the shoe is on the other foot I take it...

:Is it okay then to respond to evil with the exact same evil? Especially since this will likely hurt those that had no involvement with the evil in the first place.

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

[nebaz]

I don't understand why you are impressed. Looking down on other people comes easily to most of us.

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

[LandDolphin]

French were acting like arrogant assholes before, just wait 'til you see what the Americans act like!

We've already got them beat!

when China becomes the economic and technological center of the world.

Whiel that may eventually happen, I do not foresee an Asian Langauge replacing English. That is, unless they adopt an alhpabet.

Re:Really impressive

[bdunogier]

Nice. Yes, we are about as great with foreign languages as most US citizens are. Yes, I do consider I'm able to communicate with anyone who speaks english ;)

Us ? Arrogant ? You must be kidding.

Re:Really impressive

[venicebeach]

Nonsense.

My distaste for French people is based entirely on how they post on Slashdot.

Re:Really impressive

[bdunogier]

Care to elaborate ? That was a tad empty.

Re:Really impressive

[ElKry]

You must be new here.

Re:Really impressive

[bdunogier]

New poster, yes. Definitely not a new reader.

I told myself this topic would be a good opportunity to see the kind of reactions such a post, made with an open-mind, would get as replies.

Re:Really impressive

[ElKry]

see the kind of reactions such a post, made with an open-mind, would get as replies.

You must be... know what, nevermind.

Re:Really impressive

[bdunogier]

Hmmm... masochist ? Suicidal ?

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...

Re:Really impressive

[j00r0m4nc3r]

I look down on everyone, without bias or prejudice.

Re:Really impressive

[bdunogier]

Thank you for that, this was really insightful.

It is a fact that our system doesn't really promote usage of foreign languages. I do work with an international company, and have mostly worked with french customers/partners. The simple fact of providing training materials in english is often badly accepted. But it seems to be getting better.

One of the reasons why most french people's english is at best mediocre is that you can perfectly live your whole life without having to speak or maybe even read a simple word of english. We get all movies & tv shows dubbed, books translated. Even foreign words / sentences in TV ads are required by law to be translated. But this is slowly changing. Our educational system is slowly being changed to introduce language courses for young kids, our since earlier this year, a dozen TV channel offer the option to watch movies & tv shows in subtitled original version.

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:Really impressive

[thetoadwarrior]

The French are often very nice and easy to get along with so I'm cool with them. But like any other group, some individuals are nice and some aren't.

The US, unfortunately, kept a hold of the islander mentality that the English have so many of them are afraid of anything different.

Re:Really impressive

[thetoadwarrior]

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.

Most people go to Paris and Parisians can be very rude which is completely unexpected from a big city. Everyone in London, New York and L.A. come off as people you'd find running a little "Mom & Pop" store in the country.

Re:Really impressive

[Dr. Evil]

I was trying to pick up a package in Berlin. I walked into the office and muddled my way through an explanation that I lived next door and the landlord asked me to retrieve the package. Half way through my second sentence, somebody at the back of the office blurted out "SPEAK ENGLISH!!". The girl I was talking to spoke back to him in German "I like it when they try to learn the language"

In Berlin it seemed that every young person wanted to learn English, that English was the language of business and they were annoyed at the inconvenience of not being native speakers. I could barely find an opportunity to speak German.

Re:Really impressive

[Beetle B.]

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?

Wow. Take one exaggerated claim and add another one to it. What you state is really, really rare IME. Most of the people I've come across who have poked fun at other people's English are foreigners/immigrants who live in the US. I rarely hear a US born individual disparage other people's foibles in the English language.

Re:Really impressive

[bidule]

I don't know, but if I make the effort to learn a foreign language and I end up doing better than a native speaker, I have every right to put their laziness in their faces.

At best, they're still learning and will fix "there lose effect". At worst, they'll pay the price for their stupidity. Repeatedly.

Re:Really impressive

[Beetle B.]

I don't know, but if I make the effort to learn a foreign language and I end up doing better than a native speaker, I have every right to put their laziness in their faces.

Fun fact: Exercising your rights does not exclude you from being a jerk because you exercised them.

At best, they're still learning and will fix "there lose effect". At worst, they'll pay the price for their stupidity. Repeatedly.

Stupidity: The act of equating poor English with stupidity.

Re:Really impressive

[bidule]

I don't know, but if I make the effort to learn a foreign language and I end up doing better than a native speaker, I have every right to put their laziness in their faces.

Fun fact: Exercising your rights does not exclude you from being a jerk because you exercised them.

Well, I'd rather be corrected when I make a mistake. Or are you poking fun at my English for using the wrong idiom?

At best, they're still learning and will fix "there lose effect". At worst, they'll pay the price for their stupidity. Repeatedly.

Stupidity: The act of equating poor English with stupidity.

stupid - adjective - lacking intelligence or common sense.
intelligence - noun - 1 the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills.
ergo : lacking the ability to acquire and apply grammar rules

It wouldn't be the Internet if you weren't allowed to be a stupid jerk once in a while.

Re:Really impressive

[luisdom]

1) As a Spanish employee of a french company, I can honestly say that they're quite polite in language misuse, if you are polite to them
2) Applies to every capital city of the countries I've visited: England, Germany, France... and Spain is no exception: the "capitalers" are assholes.

Re:Still better than the CRIA

[Arancaytar]

I cannot help but smile at the karmic deliciousness of a "RIA" organization being sued for billions for infringement.

What I was wondering...

[JeanPaulBob]

Does this mean Google infringed copyright with tongue?

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?

[bdunogier]

Thank you for that. To be a bit more accurate, publishers have sued google for making available complete versions of books google didn't have an agreement for, BUT only books that weren't commercialized anymore. I'm hesitating here: on one hand, the publishers pretending that doing that is an insult to the author's work, making available a book that's no longer available for purchase is also a bit insulting... the only interests I see protected here are the publisher's. So... ideally, google would contest the trial's result, and this would end up in a deal everyone would benefit from. But law should be the same for everybody, whatever the size of your lawyer's team. Oh, and by the way, in response to godrik's comment above (http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1483636&cid=30492642) both left AND right wing do believe in this carbon crap. And you should too

Re:Found?

[Sparr0]

Until today I didn't know Google had a presence in France. How many billions of dollars would a judgment need to be to make it worthwhile for them to just pack up and leave?

Re:Found?

[bdunogier]

What happens when Google pulls the plug on all French language sites

What happens ? Simple. Google starts losing fortunes, since we kind of have something like 20 million DSL subscribers which happen to be among the most attractive in the world. Google also starts firing french employees, since they no longer have any business in france, and other advertising providers take over the market.

Yeah, google is very likely to pull french results off its index

Re:Found?

[MoeDrippins]

> I absolutely agree, sort of.

Is that agreeing more or less than, "I sort of agree, absolutely."?

Re:Found?

[steelfood]

Maybe for once, they can change the law to be for the better... Not likely of course, since if they do get the law change, the new law would probably end up screwing over authors. But still, one can hope.

Re:Found?

[grumbel]

Sounds to me like Google is doing a little civil disobedience here. The publishers and libraries had now a good 10 years to get their act together and put a decent online offering up, but what have they done? Pretty much nothing. So Google being a little ignorant to the law and doing what they think is the right thing to do, really sounds like a good thing, as it might one way or the other, lead finally to a situation where the Internet is no longer ignored by the other side.

Re:Found?

[uncanny]

Who's law? Does that mean they should follow all laws of, say Cuba, or some other weird little country?

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.

Re:Found?

[RoboRay]

Many Cubans are offended that you have lumped them in with the French.

Re:Found?

[sexconker]

Google profits off of each search made on their site.

People would find those listings by searching for them, or for similar things.

Google profited off of the listings.

That's not fair use.

Re:Found?

[pla]

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.

I think you've missed the bigger picture of what Google does...

Every single website in existence falls under the Berne treaty, and no one except the author has any legal right whatsoever to view it except as the author wishes. Which means, put simply, Google can't legally exist under this ruling. This has nothing to do with books, except insofar as publishers whined the loudest so far, and found a forum willing to humor them (note that the RIAA, as evil as we consider them, deliberately chose a visible yet inherently useless strategy; the publishing industry has chosen to actually attack the real "problem", for good or for bad).

Do you remember the dark days before internet search engines? I, for one, do; and to state it bluntly, the modern web as we know it centers around the search engine. Without that, you have nothing but a collection of megacorp portals and ego sites. Thanks, but no thanks. If what Google does breaks the law, we need the law broken.

Re:Found?

[PhilHibbs]

Don't be silly, it's only €300,000 - no-one's going to put Google out of business in their country over a copyright infringement.

Re:Found?

[DarkofPeace]

I don't know anything about the French legal system, but is this similar to the problem in the US where you must have standing to bring it before the court? Maybe Google needed to be sued to challenged the meaning of the law?

Re:Found?

[DarkofPeace]

Yes, if they have a server in Cuba. Now if the Cubans want to go to Google.us or Google .bfe, then thats not Google's fault.

Re:Found?

[TheRaven64]

My publisher (which owns most of the tech publishers in the USA) lets you browse my books via Safari Books Online, lets you buy DRM-free PDF copies, and lets people with the more expensive subscriptions download the PDFs for free. They've been doing this since before Google introduced book search. Possibly you just haven't been paying attention.

Re:Found?

[TheRaven64]

Unlike Google search provides you with a very small snippet of the original page, which would be counted as a quote under fair use / fair dealings. It also respects headers expressing the author's wishes about whether it should cache the content. By putting something online, you are implicitly granting permission for anyone to access it and they can then use their fair use rights to reproduce small quotes. The situation with books is entirely different. They are not being placed online, Google is buying (or, in some cases, borrowing) printed copies and scanning them (producing an unauthorised copy). It is then placing this copy online in its entirety (although restricting users to viewing a few pages per session), producing another unauthorised copy for each user.

Re:Found?

[petermgreen]

E300000 initially and then E10K a day (that's about E3.5 million a year) until they remove the content in question.

However IMO the big deal is likely not this judgement per-se but the me-too lawsuits that are likely to follow.

Re:Found?

[cyberthanasis12]

When the US people rebelled against Great Britain so long ago, they...

brazenly did shit that was completely illegal. I am glad they got hit for it.

Re:Found?

[cyberthanasis12]

Just as an afterthought, in case that my very intelligent fellow Americans (in the justice department) miss the meaning of my previous comment.
My previous comment was heavily ironic and I declare that I never thought that the American revolution was a bad thing.

Re:Found?

[janwedekind]

20 million DSL subscribers which happen to be among the most attractive in the world

Google would definitely loose out if they would remove the pictures of the most attractive DSL subscribers in the world ;)

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

[Migraineman]

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.

That's quite the matter-of-fact statement there, chief. Lots of folks actually want their creative works indexed by Google et al. Google indexes an excerpt of my work, and links back to some form of source content. Note that I haven't paid a dime for this service ...

Note also that the individuals who are complaining are the ones who currently have a stranglehold on the distribution channel - the publishers. If an index like Google can connect the customer directly with the content creator, that makes the distributor rather irrelevant, n'est-ce pas?

Re:Make sense

[bdunogier]

While I agree that copyrights do need to evolve, I can not agree to google's approach here: you don't violate existing laws because you're convinced your way is better. It's not communism or anything: it's democracy, and most of us here have ancestors who fought to get it. Right ?

And yes, I'm against the 3 strikes law (which isn't gonna have the intended effect, quite the opposite) and in favour of a global creative contribution

Re:Make sense

[ElKry]

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.

If your content shows up in Google's results, then Google is giving you advertising and publicity. Would you rather pay for that? Is your perfect model that Google pays you for indexing your data, and then you pay Google for offering that content in their searches?

Additionally, if you don't want to show up on their results because it's unfair that your website is making them so much money, I have a robots.txt to sell you, Mr Murdoch...

Re:Make sense

[Grishnakh]

Fair Use is an American concept, I'm pretty sure, and is upheld by a Supreme Court ruling.

This story is about France, a different country. I won't pretend to be an expert on their laws, but assuming they also protect Fair Use the way that American law does is probably not a good idea. The way the court ruling went, I'd wager that they actually don't recognize Fair Use whatsoever.

It's stupid, yes. But those are their laws over there. American law presently has a lot of stupid stuff in it (e.g., DMCA), but Fair Use is one of the best things that American IP law has ever come up with, IMO. It would be smart for the French (and everyone else) to recognize Fair Use too, but if they don't want to, that's their choice (which they'll suffer for).

Re:Make sense

[maxume]

It is my hope that my ancestors fought for freedom, and conceded that democracy was the best way to compromise it.

Re:Make sense

[Migraineman]

Wow, you've caught me on an unusually good day. Lemme reach into the big bag o' Troll Feed and let's examine this deeper.

This is bullshit.

Quite possibly, but your emotional reaction tends to indicate that it isn't.

Without the publisher advertising and distributing the book nobody would even know it existed.

A little narrow minded to restrict this to books, but we'll entertain this constraint for now, as it is relevant to the original story. You are correct, without some form of "advertisement," be it word of mouth or billboards along the roadside, nobody would know your book existed. However, the "publisher" in the traditional sense of the word has become irrelevant. There are many avenues at my disposal to advertise a work that don't involve a greedy middleman. Youtube is a great example. Publication and distribution in electronic formats is perfectly viable these days.

If you think its so easy to make it as an author without a publisher, prove it, publish your results, else STFU because you have no fucking clue what you're talking about.

When did I claim it was easy to be an author? I said "Lots of folks actually want their creative works indexed." That does include myself. As for "prove it," I am the author or co-author of a number of technical standards (radio and terrestrial communications) where I received not one thin dime of compensation for doing so, and get this, the standards are publicly available, so I also don't get any compensation when people implement the standards in products.

And just to pre-empt other retards here, no, pointing to a few examples isn't "proof".

How many would be enough? Ten? One hundred? Actually I'm quite amused by the whole "don't show me actual proof, cuz' I just called that it doesn't count." Care to stamp your feet and hold your breath until you turn blue? BTW, I call that the neighbor's tree is "base" where copyright doesn't apply.

Google is using copyright content without permission to make money on online bookstore click-throughs.

They're using an excerpt of the work in question, and the publishers are getting bent out of shape because they're being muscled out of their personal playground.

Somehow I don't think they would be so careless with GPL copyright as it would freak out the simpleton fanbois like you who they desperately need as part of their online forum defense squad.

Fanboi? Forum Defense Squad? Do members of the FDS get to wear nifty uniforms?

Seriously, I don't see anything that reads like "Google can do no wrong." They provide an index, with some advertising that covers the costs. They don't charge me to list my content on their search engine, and my publications are exposed to a broader base of people than I could do otherwise by myself. I benefit from this relationship, directly.

Re:Make sense

[zeropointburn]

something else to consider...

The publishers are the ones who are selling books to those same distributors that pay for click-through sales. The publishers are already making their money (now). The problem for them is when cheap online printing services pair up with authors (content creators if you prefer) and with google to eliminate the traditional publishers, publicists, and distributors.

Re:Make sense

[cpt kangarooski]

Democracy doesn't always produce the right answer, and not all laws are worthy of respect, or even legitimate.

Compare speed limits (respected but usually broken), Prohibition (not respected, usually broken), and Civil Rights laws (initially not respected, initially usually broken).

I'd say that usually the government should enact laws that conform with the stated wishes and actual behavior of its people. Sometimes it is good for the government to get in a fight with the people, such as the federal government forcing the South to desegregate, but more usually it is not a good idea, partially because the stakes are so much lower, such as when they banned alcohol.

Overall, I'd say that copyright is more like Prohibition than Civil Rights. While Prohibition was widely considered to be a good idea at the time, it was immediately ignored by pretty much everyone. The lawlessness that this engendered quickly spread, and soon the fact that people ignored the laws about drinking meant that there was a huge upswing in official corruption, in violence, and in organized crime.

If people want to do things which currently would be copyright infringement, I think we would be best off in legalizing this, rather than fighting it. Fighting it hasn't worked so far, and probably never will. But the collateral damage done by the disrespect people have for one law will spread into disrespect for other laws, and the damage done in combating it will be worse than the offenses committed (e.g. three strikes). This issue just isn't important enough for the government to defend; better to yield.

Plus, of course, there's simply no evidence whatsoever that any current copyright law is democratic in nature. For over a century, special interests have dominated the field, and Congress has passed whatever they've been told to pass. More recently, international treaties have been used to completely circumvent domestic political debate, so that ever-worsening laws can be presented as a fait accompli. See e.g. the ACTA treaty, the details of which are being kept secret, which will certainly be non-negotiable once the public and our democratic representatives have a chance to see it, and which will be tied to other important issues so that it is dragged into law not because it is popularly wanted, but because it is inseparable from things we do want (although I'd find that part doubtful too, really).

So don't blather on about democracy; it is absent here, and is likely to malfunction even if we did consult it.

It isn't good to break laws, since this can destabilize society, and it isn't good for society to have bad laws on the books. But which course of action we should take -- breaking it, or suffering from it -- depends on which would be better. Here's another example: The Fugitive Slave Act. I would not have hesitated to break that one; a society that has a law like that is in need of destabilization. We're not at that point with copyright, by any means, but it does remind us that just because something is a law, that doesn't mean we ought to obey it.

I like the idea of copyright, and I think we certainly ought to have copyright laws. But I hate our current copyright laws, and they're getting worse. Depending on who breaks them, and how, I may not have a problem with it, personally.

When we have good laws, we'll talk some more.

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~

Re:Make sense

[bdunogier]

As I think I've said earlier or later in these comments, I also do not agree to the current copyright laws. Ever since it has been possible to copy music to tapes, the absurdity has been visible. This can not be assimilated to counterfeit, as quality and product ARE equivalent to the copied one, unlike manufacted goods.

But what the majority wants still isn't reason enough to allow any kind of behaviour. Let's face the truth, what the majority wants is very commonly driven by selfish motives (like speed limits).

We do need copyrights of some kind, as everyone should be rewarded when his work is used in any way. But we also do consume so much more medias than we used to, and this volume doesn't imply more work from artists than it used to. A few years ago, having thousands of hours worth of music in your pocket or backpack was... hardly imaginable (or would have required a bloody large pocket). Global fundings of different types have been proposed many times, but were systematically rejected by the right wing, who argued it wouldn't be fair, and we couldn't measure in a realistic and effective way who should get what, and that those who don't use digital media would pay for nothing. Which is exactly what is happening these days for TV here, as you pay a yearly contribution (100 bucks or so) as soon as you own a TV set.

But I refuse to place books on the same level as that. Maybe I'm more attached to the book physical object than I am to CDs or DVDs.

Whatever happens, we can't just say "screw copyright, I'll read/listen/watch for free whatever I want". It does not work that way. When you do believe in proper democracy _ which would be the one you described, people driven, you try to change things, not decide how it should work and establish your private law. For instance, create a legal music streaming website that demonstrates how advertising alone can help provide everyone with a fair way of listening to music without spending fortunes while paying a fair amount to the artists (artists or majors, this still has to be changed, but at least it's getting better).

Re:Make sense

[Pecisk]

What do you mean with saying that speed limits are broken as a law? Please clarify.

Re:Make sense

[cpt kangarooski]

What do you mean with saying that speed limits are broken as a law? Please clarify.

You may be misunderstanding me. I'm saying that while people generally acknowledge that speed limits are a good idea, and should be enforced, they also speed and hope not to get caught at it.

Re:Make sense

[mpe]

Compare speed limits (respected but usually broken)

Maybe what is respected here is the idea, but the implimentation can make little sense. Or even appear to be designed to raise revenue through fines rather than improve safety.

Overall, I'd say that copyright is more like Prohibition than Civil Rights. While Prohibition was widely considered to be a good idea at the time, it was immediately ignored by pretty much everyone. The lawlessness that this engendered quickly spread, and soon the fact that people ignored the laws about drinking meant that there was a huge upswing in official corruption, in violence, and in organized crime.

Yet dispite this we still have "prohibition". It's just been renamed "The War on Drugs".

Re:Make sense

[TheRaven64]

There are lots of good reasons for objecting to speed limits, but the main one is that they can't be set correctly. Speed limits are intended as a proxy for dangerous driving laws. No one really cares if you are going at 150mph along a road, they care that you are driving in a way that is likely to cause an accident. The problem with speed limits is that they have to be set to averages. All of the roads near my mother, for example, have a 30mph speed limit. Some of them can be safe at closer to 50mph, some are incredibly difficult to drive safely on at 15mph. In heavy rain or ice, the safe speed drops considerably on these roads. Someone who slows down to 20mph through the narrow road in the middle of the village and then accelerates to 35mph as they enter the straight stretch with no turnings and good visibility is breaking the law. Someone who drives at exactly 30mph along the entire road is not, but is far more likely to cause an accident.

If you set speed limits above the safe speed for a road in the current conditions, then it encourages dangerous driving because people regard the speed limit as a proxy for the safe speed. If you set them below the safe speed then people disregard them and they are no use when they really do reflect the safe speed. For them to be useful, they would need to be set on much shorter stretches of road and they would need to change based on visibility. They would then introduce the problem that they'd be changing so often that they'd distract the driver's attention from other hazards...

Re:Make sense

[cpt kangarooski]

But what the majority wants still isn't reason enough to allow any kind of behaviour.

I agree. It isn't good enough to live in a democracy; not only must the democracy be moderated, so that it doesn't devolve into mob rule, but there must also be protection for minorities, particularly unpopular minorities. Thus the example of the government finally living up to its obligations to protect the civil rights of black people, over the objections of many in the white majority.

Let's face the truth, what the majority wants is very commonly driven by selfish motives

Yes. For example, the majority selfishly wants more creative works to be written and published, and to be as unrestricted as possible, as soon as possible, with regard to what they can do with those works. That is the one and only reason to justify copyright; majority selfishness. Copyright isn't a civil liberty or anything, remember, it is an utterly utilitarian system for helping the public appease their greed for unrestricted works. Indeed, copyright runs directly counter to some of our most important civil liberties, and would be totally intolerable if it not only was state-sponsored censorship (which it is) but was also a bad deal (which it may be, but probably doesn't necessarily have to be).

We do need copyrights of some kind, as everyone should be rewarded when his work is used in any way.

No, we don't need copyrights; the best you can say about them is that we may be better off with copyrights, than without them. Nor should everyone "be rewarded when his work is used in any way." That's not a justification for copyright.

Again, copyrights not a right, they are utilitarian; they should only be granted, when and to the extent that, it benefits the public to do so. If the public is better off granting a copyright to an author, then let's do so. And if the public is better off not granting a copyright to an author, then let's do that. Likewise, the precise duration and amount of protection should be determined by what's best for the public, not what's best for, or desired by the author.

Global fundings of different types have been proposed many times, but were systematically rejected by the right wing, who argued it wouldn't be fair, and we couldn't measure in a realistic and effective way who should get what, and that those who don't use digital media would pay for nothing.

If you mean for everything, generally, I agree with the right wingers on this one (to my surprise). The genius of copyright is that authors who create popular works will get greater rewards than authors who create lousy works; the government doesn't have to directly put in a penny from the public coffers. Copyright isn't a reward, so much as it is a lens or funnel, which directs more of the money that can be made from the work to the copyright holder than he would get otherwise. Although do note that it imposes a transactional cost that can reduce the amount of money being made from a work as well. E.g. 'It's a Wonderful Life' only became popular once it was out of copyright, precisely because it was out of copyright, and thus cheap to air. Even the cost of getting permission, were it granted for free, would've been too much.

I don't mind the government running public museums. I don't mind the government providing some aid to the arts community, if only to keep certain art forms from practically dying out (opera is not a big profit center), or to keep artists employed at something they're good at (e.g. in the 30's, the WPA ran theaters to keep actors working, writing projects to keep authors working, etc.), or hiring artists to beautify public buildings and monuments (Beaux-Arts is nice, but pretty much everything since WW2 is total crap). But beyond this, I don't want the government getting involved in artistic decisions. And providing money without making artistic decisions is even worse, since it lets artists engage in fraud or at least misuse of funds, very easily.

Better to keep the government m

Re:Make sense

[Migraineman]

We do need copyrights of some kind, as everyone should be rewarded when his work is used in any way.

You're begging the question. Copyright law is a nod to human behavior. If food was free, you'd be a glutton. If entertainment was free, you'd be a couch potato. In an ideal communist society, people take only what they need, and produce what they're capable of. To function properly, that needs to be self-policing. In the real worls, that situation tends toward the leviathan on the couch. Why lift a finger when you don't have to? "Soft" work outputs like music and books are easily duplicated, which drives their cost toward zero.

Let's back this up and consider the situation from an economics perspective. Entertainment is a commodity. Your "free time" is a reasonably fixed resource, limited by your available time and your disposable income. Now, more than ever, there is competition for your free time. Decades ago, people used to go to the movies, or go to a local show ... other alternatives weren't available. Now, people blog, play MMPGORMPGs well into the night, or run hobby businesses. Competition should have reduced the price of traditional entertainment, but that hasn't really happened. People are starting to really comprehend that their time has value, and going to the movies, or buying an audio CD, or buying a book "isn't worth it."

Let's segue back to the book. Let's assume that I value my time (and I do.) Buying a book for a recreational read is a risk. I'm not interested in wasting my time, so I do a little digging. The cover art is pretty, and the back flap has a glowing review from the New York Times Post Dispatch Review, using such words as "thrilling" and "spectacular." If I can Google an excerpt and find out that the writing is stiff like cardboard ... no sale. And that right there is the crux of the problem. I can make an informed decision without making a trek to the local library. The impulse buy is effectively killed by readily available previews. Traditional publishers cringe at the thought that revenues will plummet overnight (nevermind that they should be putting an eye toward quality over quantity.)

In response to this threat, traditional media publishers are fighting back. Reducing their prices results in reduced revenues, which is the result they don't want. So instead, they're changing the legal landscape in their favor. Globally.

Re:Make sense

[mpe]

We do need copyrights of some kind, as everyone should be rewarded when his work is used in any way.

Plenty of past societies have managed without the concept of copyright. Even today the real danger for authors, poets, musicians, etc is that people who might enjoy their work will not even know it exists.

Re:Never said it was

[Coren22]

and now the EU is dishing it out to the Canadians

Wrong article? Or did Google move to Canada now for the more sane government?

What?

[mcgrew]

France didn't surender to Google???

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.

Lol

[Giant Electronic Bra]

I was thinking of the nice approach of the EU to Canada over IP stuff. It is all kind of part and parcel though. Google gets spanked, Canada gets spanked. Looks like they're going to throw their weight around a bit now.

Lets all remember, Europe, those nice fellas that enslave... er I mean enlightened the rest of the world! lol. ;)

Way to kill a minority dialect

[EEPROMS]

Last I looked the French language although still in use by millions within France doesn't have a high international growth of new speakers. The Japanese faced the same problem and now they go out of their way to export their culture and make it available on the web. So now Japanese culture and the language has become a big money earner for them but the actions of the French seem to me to be a backwards step for a language that is becoming more and more a minority dialect.

Re:Way to kill a minority dialect

[TheCowSaysMooNotBoo]

500 million people is far from a 'minority dialect'. also, compared to english it's just a hard language to learn the basics imo. Good thing most europeans are not like Americans, and don't act all surprised if their language isn't spoken everywhere.

Re:Way to kill a minority dialect

[Ossifer]

A majority of the Europeans I've encountered when I lived or travelled in these countries, acted all surprised if English wasn't spoken where they were.

Re:Never said it was

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Yeah, its the end of the US lording it over the rest of the world for sure. We did make this bed though and now we're going to have to sleep in it. We could have gotten off oil 30 years ago when the handwriting was on the wall, stayed out of Vietnam, kept the CIA out of everyone else's business etc. Doesn't make us worse than anyone else, but we sure didn't make things better. Ah well, so it goes. Whoever's the next whip hand will get theirs in turn as well no doubt.

Make NO sense

[StevenMaurer]

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.

Re:Make NO sense

[cpt kangarooski]

Well, you're talking web sites, rather than books, but there's a couple of problems with your post.

First, a typical search engine doesn't have to rely upon fair use; the DMCA safe harbor is more accomodating.

Second, your analysis is wrong and incomplete in the fourth factor. Web sites do not, as a rule, suffer financially by being indexed without authorization. There is no market for selling rights to index a site. And it's trivially easy for any site to have itself removed from the Google index, if it does think it can sell that right. And considering the burdens involved, it is easier for an unusual web site copyright holder to opt out than it is for Google to contact every one of them so that they can opt in.

Remember, fair use is not intended to help copyright holders; it is intended to prevent mindless adherence to the rest of copyright law from acting contrary to the expressly stated constitutional purpose of copyright law: to promote the progress of science. Search engines for the web are good for society; a lack of them is not good. The ability for copyright holders to opt in, rather than to opt out, does not outweigh this. Ergo, search engines are apt to be a fair use.

And that's a good thing, since I'm sensing a lot of mindlessness emanating from your post.

Copyright shouldn't guarantee you profits, but what it should do is prevent other from profiting on your work without your permission

Copyright has never guaranteed profits for copyright holders; whether they profit or not depends on the market. Copyright merely concentrates profits toward them, however much they might be. But copyright has never even tried to completely concentrate profits toward copyright holders. See, e.g. First Sale.

Remember, copyright isn't intended to help authors. It is intended to help the public. It helps the public by encouraging the creation and publication of works, and by minimizing the length and scope of copyright so that the public is as free as possible to actually use those works as it sees fit (which includes being able to get works for free).

We only temporarily grant copyrights of limited scope in order to encourage creation and publication. It is only good sense to grant the least amount of copyright necessary for a work to be created and published. Any larger of a grant than that would be wasted, in much the same way that if someone will sell you a gallon of gas for $3, you'd be a fool to buy it for $5.

If an author will create and publish with others able to profit in some way from the work, then that's perfectly appropriate. If another author will not, then perhaps we ought to give that author more. But we should remember that some authors may want so much more that the ultimate benefit to the public is less than the cost in terms of what we surrender. In that case, we are literally better off not giving the author what he wants, even if this means we don't get the work created and published. Some things just come at too high a price.

While I find Google to be dangerous from a privacy perspective, I think that their search engine (and those of their competitors) being comprehensive is far and away more important than respecting the wishes of mere authors with regard to search engines.

This is especially true given that copyright holders can opt out now, but virtually none care to do so, which strongly indicates that your claims have no basis in fact. If the copyright holders did care, why do they not take even trivial steps to make it clear?

Re:Make NO sense

[cpt kangarooski]

DMCA safe harbor protects providers from the unlawful acts of others. Google is copying material without authorization on their own accord.

Mea culpa. Thanks for the catch.

''Some terms in the clause are used in archaic meanings, potentially confusing modern readers. ... "Science" is not limited to fields of modern scientific inquiry, but to all knowledge, including philosophy and literature.''

Looks like you're one of the confused modern readers.

No, the material you quoted supports what I was saying. In the copyrights and patents clause of the Constitution, the word 'science' refers to the subject matter of copyright (i.e. creative works), while the words 'useful arts' refer to the subject matter of patents (i.e. technology). Copyright is meant to promote the progress of Science. It's just an oddity of the English language and the clause that we now associate the arts with copyright (except when we don't, e.g. prior art, or state of the art technology), and science with patents.

This is also evident from just reading the clause, which is always structured in copyright/patent order: The Congress shall have power ... To promote the progress of science [copyrights] and useful arts [patents], by securing for limited times to authors [copyrights] and inventors [patents] the exclusive right to their respective writings [copyrights] and discoveries [patents];

Moving on....

Second sale doesn't involve copies.

Since copies are tangible objects in which works are fixed, I'd say it does. Perhaps you meant to say that it does not involve copying.

But again, so what? It can be lawful to make copies without infringing on copyright, e.g. when a for-profit business purchases copies of software, and then makes backups of it pursuant to section 117, in order to save on the cost of purchasing replacement copies if the first set of copies go bad somehow. ...by helping authors.

To the minimum extent necessary to help the public to the maximum extent possible. You are confusing the means with the ends.

This is circular logic, arguing whether copyright exists to help authors or whether authors exist because copyright helps them.

Well I didn't start that. Authors do not exist because copyright helps them. Authors exist independently of copyright. Copyright is one incentive for them to create, but it is not the only one, nor is it always the most important one. I used ot be a professional artist, making a comfortable living, and I never made a penny by exploiting my copyrights, whether directly or indirectly. I didn't need to.

Fame, art for art's sake, money that can be made without exploiting copyrights, etc. are all very strong, even today, and would be in a tomorrow without copyright.

Re:Make NO sense

[romiz]

There is no "Fair Use" in French law.

The relevant law, the "Code de la Propriété intellectuelle", governs all the exceptions to the author's rights. The default state is that the author retains all rights to his work, and any use of this work needs his authorization. Then the law adds a significant list of exemptions, which builds a system that functions in a way similar to the "Fair Use" system. But the relevant article describing the exceptions is more detailed than the fair use provisions. (Original article of the law, if you read French)

The provision the closest to what Google is doing is number 8 for the article (L122-5 of the CPI), which allows global reproduction for conservation and study by patrons for research or private use, but only if that service is provided by a library open to the public, a museum or an archival service, and the resulting work is only available on dedicated consultation terminals within the building, and only if this does not provide commercial or economic advantage to the entity providing the service. It does not state, however, that no compensation is required, only that the author may not prevent this to be done with works that have been divulged to the public.

But since Google doesn't qualify for this exemption, it means that the copies were unlawful. The only thing in question in this judgment is how much of a prejudice to the authors the use Google made was, and there the ruling is much more debatable.

Re:Make NO sense

[hannson]

Mod parent up!

I really don't see how indexing is making an unauthorized copy. You cannot view a website without copying it. Am I therefor making unauthorized copy of every page I visit?  My computer automatically indexes all the sites I visit, am I breaking the law?

These are rhetorical questions btw... oh and cpt kangarooski:

+----------+
|  PLEASE  |
|  DO NOT  |
| FEED THE |
|  TROLLS  |
+----------+
    |  |
    |  |
  .\|.||/..

Re:With the rise of the EU...

[ivucica]

So now that the "fuck you" attitude is suddenly coming from this side of the atlantic, it's a problem? Software patents, copyright lobbyists are European products, right? If the coin needs flipping sometimes, I'm all for it.

And now after this --

[dwiget001]

|| ...the highbrow Editions du Seuil publishing house, argued that publishers and authors were losing out in the latest stage of the digital revolution." ||

They just ensured that they will continue "losing out in the latest stage of the digital revolution". Great thinking, yeah!

Ever walk into a library and smell....

[BruceSchaller]

That sweet sickly smell in libraries... That is the smell of the collection rotting.

That is the waste of human knowledge with time. Failing to secure the knowledge of the world's past is criminal. Digital copies of all published work should exist, in a single location, for the preservation of knowledge.

I agree that rightholders should be able to control access to their content. Perhaps a payment system can be worked into the equation. The cost should be considerably less than print works, simply because digital data doesn't require printing, etc, etc... Orphan works should, however, remain part of our history, and should be accessible. Furthermore, any work in the public domain should be available.

So far, I've bought three books for which excerpts were available. They were scientific works, which I would not have considered buying unless I had seen a preview, to ensure they had the relevant data I needed. I then donated those books to my library.

Win, win, win, for everybody. Vive le googlebooks...

Re:Ever walk into a library and smell....

[cdrguru]

The problem is that everyone thinks that digital works should be cheaper because there is no printing or distribution cost. Only problem is, printing and distributing books is very, very cheap. Altogether it might cost $4 to print, bind and ship a book today. Maybe $5 for some fancy hardcover books.

The primary cost of books is the editing and other content-management functions. The author doesn't get that much of it - but without the editing, formatting, marketing, and so on and so forth books simply do not sell. Ask any self-published author what they are getting.

Sure, it might be a good idea to have everything digitized - but don't start with scanning books. Start with getting publishers to deposit the text with someone like the Library of Congress. Primary problem with scanning books is that you have to OCR them, and OCR without intensive proofreading just isn't accuate enough. Think about the recipe where 1 tsp is mis-read as 1 tbsp - in some cases the results can be fatal.

Google's project would be fine if they didn't want to cram it down the content owner's throats. Their objective has been to grab this and potentially hold the content hostage in the future. Because they can. Libraries have let them in the door because their motives sound good, at first. In no way is Google doing this because they are nice guys - there is money in it for them. And if some other people's money gets lost in the process, it isn't going to bother them in the least little bit. This isn't even close to something that I would want to get behind.

Re:Ever walk into a library and smell....

[phayes]

Why are you defending the media establishment? Do you work for one? Have you actually talked with any authors? My father in law is an author of some repute in France & one of his novels was turned into one of the five biggest box office draws of the year some years back. Much like the RIAA, the publishing houses make lots of noises about defending the poor authors/musicians while making their business accounting as opaque as possible in order to avoid actually paying said authors. They refuse to reedit older books of marginal residual value (due to limited sales) to which they have the rights & block the authors from attempting to find ways like google to continue publishing these works. Why? Because it doesn't fit into their model of how things should be run so they can make money (& damn the authors). So what if many works are now unavailable because THEY don't know how to make it work. My FIL & many others are actively fighting for the works that the publishing houses are refusing to re-edit be available solutions like google that would reduce the cost of publishing books of marginal commercial sales value but to read from the publishing houses press releases, Google is the devil incarnate. If the publishing houses were really protecting the authors, some of the money that they have extorted from google would go to the authors of books that google has scanned. This, however is not the case and no author will see a single cent of this money.

Real Scared in Canada

[epp_b]

The LAST thing I need is France Attacking the States, Occupying Canada...

Oooh... what are they going to do, make French one of the official languages?

Re:Real Scared in Canada

[techno-vampire]

Oooh... what are they going to do, make French one of the official languages?

More likely, they'd try to make the French Canadians pay attention to the diktats of the French Academy and stop using all those perfectly good words the Academy had declared "obsolete."

Re:Real Scared in Canada

[epp_b]

In Canada, English and French are both official languages.

In Slashdot, your sarcasm detector is broken.

Re:Never said it was

[Grishnakh]

Doesn't make us worse than anyone else, but we sure didn't make things better. Ah well, so it goes. Whoever's the next whip hand will get theirs in turn as well no doubt.

"With great power comes great responsibility." America developed into the greatest power, but it didn't exercise that power responsibly. Sure, there's lots of other countries that have crappy governments that would abuse great power too, but they never had much power, while America did, and abused it for its own self-serving ends. Now it's paying for that, and the future's not going to be great for all the Americans who can't afford to pack up and move someplace better.

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:War of the cultures

[Xtifr]

the world would be more apt to find Victor Hugo in English than in French.

Because...Victor Hugo died more recently in France than he did in the rest of the world? Because copyright laws apply differently depending on the source language? I'm sorry, I have no idea what point you're trying to make here, but I'm pretty sure Victor Hugo's works are in the public domain in every country and language.

Re:War of the cultures

[AlexBirch]

The part of my posting that you ignored was "If Google stays away from all the copyrighted material in French, that means the world would be..."
To paraprhase, if it becomes too difficult to deal with French copyright, Google may simply avoid the quagmire and avoid all books with French copyrights all together.

Oddly enough I chose Victor Hugo because he is a) French and b) his works are in the public domain. However if the cost of dealing with French copyright is too high, Google simply won't deal with it.

Re:War of the cultures

[TheRaven64]

So? Project Gutenberg already has a lot of texts in French (including English and French versions of a lot of Victor Hugo's work). If Google doesn't make French books available, someone else will and they will abide by the law, rather than violating copyright and hoping that they can get away with a good settlement later. Honestly, your arguments sounds like someone saying 'if we don't grant planning permission for a pizzeria here, the mafia will just go somewhere else'.

Re:War of the cultures

[AlexBirch]

Sure someone else will... let's just say that Google is currently the world's information portal and that most people are lazy. Many people today say I researched this topic when they simply googled said topic.

My argument is more "let's not let Microsoft use our language because we have some patents*." Then people will either be forced to use an English, German, etc version instead of the French version.

--
* Yes I do understand that there aren't software patents in the EU.

Re:Still better than the CRIA

[cababunga]

Wow! This deserves its own story on Slashdot. Or there was one but I missed?

Yup

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Sure seems like it. We could have risen to that but honestly I'm not terribly convinced the US is really the epitome of anything, except consumerism. Or ever was. Maybe power is overrated.

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.

Re:Yup

[Sancho]

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.

How much of that is due to distance? America's pretty far away from all of the big powers. Waging a war across an ocean is difficult and costly. I'm sure that other country's leaders have dreamed of taking over America to get access to our resources over the centuries, but none have been fool enough to put much effort into it (if any at all.) Border wars are one thing, but attacking a country across the ocean just doesn't make much sense.

Re:Yup

[Grishnakh]

Obviously, countries like France and Poland didn't exactly choose to be invaded, so there's really no way to know whether their systems of government from before WWII would have persevered to the present day without some other upheaval. So yes, part of America's success is probably due to its advantageous location.

However, you're wrong about no countries being "fool enough" to try to take over America with a war across the ocean: Great Britain tried it in 1812, and of course lost, though they did manage to burn down the White House. Of course, the US at that time didn't have much of a military, and built one up after that, and no one tried it again. Mexico tried a few border incursion after that, but they were trying to take over (take back) specific portions of the country (Texas, New Mexico, etc.), not the whole thing.

Re:Yup

[hkz]

The Republic of the Seven United Provinces (currently known as The Netherlands) was recognized as an independent nation in 1648 already. Get off your high horse. (Before that, the Republic of Rome, etc.) Insightful my ass.

Re:Yup

[Grishnakh]

And it ceased to exist on May 15, 1940 when Dutch forces capitulated to Germany and a pro-Nazi government was installed.

We're talking about continuous systems of government here. Almost none in Europe managed to successfully survive through WWII.

Re:Yup

[el3mentary]

Britain's had a continuous government since 1660.

Re:Yup

[wiredlogic]

France has gone through five republics and some semi-dictatorships since their revolution so GPs point still stands with regards to the fundamental stability of the US system.

Re:Yup

[shutdown -p now]

Netherlands were occupied by France after the French Revolution, and then later on by the Germany in WW2, however, and he specifically listed "invasion" as reason for exclusion.

Re:Yup

[mister_playboy]

You conveniently forget about WWII.

Re:Yup

[Trahloc]

Well that's just it, you say "currently known as The Netherlands". To quote wikipedia "The Republic of the Seven United Netherlands was a European republic between 1581 and 1795, in about the same location as the modern Kingdom of the Netherlands, which is the successor state." Key words there is 'was'. The whole point the person is making is that the USA is the only one who is still the same *today*. That probably won't be true by the time we all hit retirement age but his point stands for the moment. If your pulling out the whole being a republic first, the Romans beat the Netherlands on that front. So like I said the key point is really about currently existing countries, with that qualification he's correct in his argument.

Re:Yup

[AceofSpades19]

Do you not know anything about the war of 1812? The US were the ones invading Canada, the British Empire was defending itself from the Americans not the other way around.

Re:Yup

[Philip_the_physicist]

You could argue that the Act of Union is a better date for the origin of the British government. Not that it really matters, because the Isle of Man has hadd a continuous government since about 1100.

Re:Yup

[Philip_the_physicist]

The trouble with that argument is that many Latin American countries have a system essentially identical to the US's, and they cannot really be regarded as fundamentally stable.

Re:Yup

[Grishnakh]

What the hell are you talking about? Go read the Wikipedia article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_of_1812

"There were several immediate stated causes for the U.S. declaration of war: first, a series of trade restrictions introduced by Britain to impede American trade with France, a country with which Britain was at war (the U.S. contested these restrictions as illegal under international law);[4] second, the impressment (forced recruitment) of U.S. citizens into the Royal Navy; third, the British military support for American Indians who were offering armed resistance to the expansion of the American frontier to the Northwest."

I guess you're mentioned in this sentence:
"Some Canadian historians in the early 20th century maintained that Americans had wanted to seize parts of Canada, a view that many Canadians still share, while others argue that inducing the fear of such a seizure had merely been a U.S. tactic designed to obtain a bargaining chip."
but apparently not everyone agrees with you.

Finally, "During the course of the war, both the Americans and British launched invasions of each other's territory, all of which were unsuccessful or gained only temporary success. At the end of the war, the British held parts of Maine and some outposts in the sparsely populated West while the Americans held Canadian territory near Detroit, but these occupied territories were restored at the end of the war."

Don't confuse actions during the war with causes of the war. There's nothing here about the US invading Canada as a prelude to the war, only something about them supposedly wanting to.

Re:Yup

[Grishnakh]

According to Wikipedia's article, there were a lot of problems with the original selection methods for Senators:

"This process worked without major problems through the mid-1850s, when the American Civil War was in the offing. Because of increasing partisanship and strife, many state legislatures failed to elect Senators for prolonged periods. For example, in Indiana the conflict between Democrats in the southern half of the state and the emerging Republican Party in the northern half prevented a Senate election for two years. The aforementioned partisanship led to contentious battles in the legislatures, as the struggle to elect Senators reflected the increasing regional tensions in the lead up to the Civil War.

After the Civil War, the problems multiplied. In one case in the mid-1860s, the election of Senator John P. Stockton from New Jersey was contested on the grounds that he had been elected by a plurality rather than a majority in the state legislature.[1] Stockton defended himself on the grounds that the exact method for elections was murky and varied from state to state. To keep this from happening again, the Congress passed a law in 1866 regulating how and when Senators were to be elected from each state. This was the first change in the process of senatorial elections. While the law helped, there were still deadlocks in some legislatures and accusations of bribery, corruption, and suspicious dealings in some elections. Nine bribery cases were brought before the Senate between 1866 and 1906, and 45 deadlocks occurred in 20 states between 1891 and 1905, resulting in numerous delays in seating Senators. Beginning in 1899, Delaware did not send a senator to Washington for four years."

It seems to me that our largest problem is that the country is simply too large and too diverse (a problem that goes back pretty far, obviously). I think we need to split into smaller countries that are more focussed on smaller regions (like one country for the southeast, one for the southwest, one for the northwest, California should be split in half, etc.), then these countries can unite in a weaker trade federation for mutual defense, free trade, and common currency.

Re:Yup

[Grishnakh]

Huh? Which ones? I don't know of any countries offhand that have a system that really looks like the US's, with three major branches of government, and a bicameral legislative branch (House and Senate), with a President. Most countries have British-style Parliaments and Prime Ministers.

Re:Yup

[Grishnakh]

Yes, that's why I said "almost all". I also pointed out in other posts that Britain's government now barely resembles its government in 1660; it's changed so much it's unrecognizable. Britain's kinda weird that way; their system of government has "morphed" a lot over the centuries, without ever having any giant upheavals or revolutions the way most countries have.

Re:Yup

[AceofSpades19]

Regardless, the British was hardly trying to take over the US, they were chiefly concerned with the US trading with France. Also, there was this thing called Manifest Destiny which some Americans believed in, which was the belief that the US was destined to take over the entire continent, so I have reason to believe there was at least some Americans wanting to take over Canada.

Re:Wanted more info on Editions du Seuil...

[bdunogier]

Weird, they showed up first when googling for editions du seuil or editions du seuil publishing, and 4th with editions du seuil publishing house (which, you'll have to admit, is a very unlikely search).

Don't be so sure!

[Xenographic]

Don't be too sure about that! President Sarkozy just got his third strike as a party to copyright infringement!

So we have a giant asshole who has no trouble with letting his party infringe upon the copyrights of others, while pushing 3-strikes laws for everyone else. If he wants us to go along with that, he should ban his own political party from the internet on principle.

Re:Wanted more info on Editions du Seuil...

[Anonymous Coward]

Their website: http://www.editionsduseuil.fr/

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ditions_du_Seuil

misread the subject header

[stephencrane]

On first pass I thought this said, "Google Found French Guilty of Copyright Infringement"

Re:misread the subject header

[pwfffff]

Oh my, it's a good thing you posted here then. The actual title is "Google Found Guilty of French Copyright Infringement".

Hope this helped!

Re:Never said it was

[ravenshrike]

We could easily have done what the Russians did to Eastern Europe to Western Europe after WWII if we had wanted to.Or we could have absorbed Japan. Of any government that has held significant power at any time in the history of the world, the US has been the least abusive and most egalitarian.

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.

Re:surrender....

[TheRaven64]

The military won every battle, and had the victory thrown away by politicians

Winning every battle is incredibly misleading in a guerilla war. Most engagements in Vietnam weren't battles. They were single shots being fired and American soldiers dying, but no enemy soldiers in sight. They were Americans stepping on landmines and being blown up.

Re:surrender....

[c6gunner]

Winning every battle is incredibly misleading in a guerilla war. Most engagements in Vietnam weren't battles. They were single shots being fired and American soldiers dying, but no enemy soldiers in sight. They were Americans stepping on landmines and being blown up.

Yep, losing guys to mines and snipers sucks, but it means absolutely dick in the conduct of a war. Those tactics were utilized in WW2, also, and all they were good for was disrupting the logistics of an army. They can slow down your enemy, and create an opportunity for your own soldiers to exploit, but they cannot win a war. Unless, of course, one side happens to care more about public opinion back home than they do about accomplishing their original goals - which is exactly what happened in Vietnam. There's no reason why that war couldn't have been won, except for the fact that the public didn't think it was worth winning.

Re:Never said it was

[Anne Thwacks]

why you are using dutch when You are addressing Norwegians

Its Eurospeak - you adsd up 27 languages, and then divide by 27!

Re:Never said it was

[Grishnakh]

You're talking ancient history there. The USA conducted itself fairly well back then (though its involvement in the Phillipines wasn't too pretty). Check out the USA's actions after WWII instead; they got worse and worse and worse. Vietnam, overthrowing Latin American governments and installing puppet dictatorships, overthrowing Iran's democratically-elected government and installing the Shah, etc. We're certainly not doing anything noble in Iraq right now.

Re:Wait for it...

[thetoadwarrior]

No surprise this is modded Flamebait but it's spot on.

As some of you may remember there was a article here about a country that set up a site to start selling US movies and music online without permission because the US was fucking them over and they decided to get payback.

It died long ago

[Giant Electronic Bra]

But I think the key issue may well be that we're stuck with a system that was at least adequate and maybe even ideal for a time that existed 230 years ago. Many of the principles were and are good, but the structure hasn't adapted to the modern world.

I think in many ways the British have it right. A system of government that grows, adapts and changes. Ours is fossilized.

Re:It died long ago

[Dishevel]

I think the real problem is that wonderful original government did in fact adapt to the modern world.

Re:It died long ago

[LordAndrewSama]

As a brit, I honestly never expected to, in my life, hear the words "the British have it right" regarding our government. What you say makes sense, but it just doesn't quite compute...

English, in France

[omb]

I live about 120k from the French border, the Baseler grenze, at which I stop speaking German and shift to French. Thanks to ex President Francois Mitterand almost all young French speak English since they have to pass a spoken English test to go to French University.

In the Alsace, almost all speak German as well, and in the South West Spanish "je n comprend pas" is very much a thing of the past, largely as a consequence of the mobility of labour in the EU.

Re:English, in France

[phayes]

ouais c'est ça, c'est grâce a Mitterand que tous les jeunes parlent anglais, mon cul oui... France, despite the it's ingrained anti "anglo-saxon" snobbery (which is even more present in the teachers unions than it is in the rest of french society) has been ever so slowly opening up to english because everyone realizes that by refusing to learn english that they are cutting off their nose to spite their face. English is often the only common language business partners throughout europe will have in common. While everything anglo-saxon is commonly equated with everything that is bad in modern France (as in outsoucing=bad, pollution=bad, fast-food=bad, etc) having thousands of France's most motivated young adults leave the country to work in the UK & have that regularly shown on TV is finally getting through the chauvinism. My wife teaches english in a high school & I have two kids that were in grade school during Mitterand's tenure. Mitterand's "great" measure was to declare that all grade school kids would receive an hour and a half of english a week for a semester without hiring any new teachers or allotting a budget to train the existing teachers.The only reason My kids (& all their classmates) actually received their allotted hour and a half a week is because my wife used some of her private time and taught them for free. This was only possible because she was already a teacher. Wow, thanks Mitterand... Chirac, & now Sarko have done more for the teaching of english to kids in France than Mitterand did by actually financing what little they decided on forcing through the teachers unions. The kids of my friends are actually getting english classes without having to beg for volunteers.

Re:Never said it was

[zach_the_lizard]

The involvement in Latin America (and the New World in general) has been going on since before the Civil War; most of the Western States came from Mexican territory.

Re:Never said it was

[Grishnakh]

I don't think that's exactly the same thing. Taking territory from Mexico was westward expansion earlier on in the nation's history; what I'm talking about is the 20th-century involvement in Latin American countries that the US does not share a border with, and are much farther south. Plus, there's a difference to me in simply taking territory from another country (which is at least honest and not underhanded; remember, the US won a war with Mexico, and then purchased that territory with cash), and trying to secretly corrupt another country's government from the inside; that's sneaky and underhanded.

The beginning of really bad American actions seems to me to start with the war in the Phillipines in the late 1890s. WTF were we doing way over there?

Re:Never said it was

[Penguinisto]

Sure, there's lots of other countries that have crappy governments that would abuse great power too, but they never had much power, while America did, and abused it for its own self-serving ends.

...so I take it you've never heard of The East India Trading Company (see also The Opium Wars, India, et al), The Warsaw Pact, the acronym SQPR, the term "Lebensraum", The Greater Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, etc?

Granted that the US leadership over its history certainly was never a pack of choir boys, but damn... that's pretty ballsy to claim that they were the worst offenders of power in world history.

Re:Never said it was

[_Sprocket_]

It doesn't matter who's hand is on the whip. Everyone's hand gets smacked at some point in history. Some get anhilated before even having a hand on a whip. The world is a violent, rough place.

To be sure - the US has screwed up any number of times throughout history. It doesn't take a lot to come up with examples of these mistakes (and outright blunders). But at the same time, when delving in to these embarassments, let's not pretend like the field was layed out by the US. There were and continue to be plenty of other entities operating in the world. And for every under-the-table attempt made by the US to make the world what it wants, there's several examples of someone else doing the exact same thing. When one looks at the laundry list of US bad actions, one should also be very conscious of who else has a list that coincides. That doesn't negate the misdeeds of the US. But it does demonstrate that, despite what some seem to believe, the US isn't the sole reason for the world's woes.

Re:Never said it was

[c6gunner]

Check out the USA's actions after WWII instead; they got worse and worse and worse.

They did? Can you quantify that?

Vietnam, overthrowing Latin American governments and installing puppet dictatorships, overthrowing Iran's democratically-elected government and installing the Shah, etc. We're certainly not doing anything noble in Iraq right now.

Oh, I see. You're just on the everything-that-America-does-is-bad bandwagon.

No, the US hasn't gotten any worse since WW2 - if anything they've gotten better. The only thing that's changed is popular opinion. If people in the 40's had thought the way that you do now, they'd have been condemning the US for turning Germany and Japan into puppet states, and would have been demanding that Truman be prosecuted for war crimes. That didn't happen because most people back then had a much more pragmatic outlook on life. Fighting a real war tends to do that.

Re:Still better than the CRIA

[easyTree]

Wow! This deserves its own story on Slashdot. Or there was one but I missed?

Yes.

Re:Gosh, it wouldn't parallel the way the US...

[easyTree]

Re:Gosh, it wouldn't parallel the way the US...

Has treated the rest of the world for the last 50 years or so would it? Don't like it when the shoe is on the other foot I take it...

It's not possible to mention US corruption and hypocrisy on slashdot without being modded down. Truth hurts.

Re:Never said it was

[easyTree]

Serves America right for being a bunch of stupid, ignorant, greedy, power-mad thugs who will consume each other from the inside.

Soon America will be just a bunch of vacation property for rich Arabs and Chinamen. The only jobs left will be service jobs which cater to said foreigners. The education system will crumble under its own top-heavy weight while mosques which rival the largest megachurches will pop up everywhere. The American military, continuing to wage unpopular wars, will exhaust its resources and become mercenaries for hire waging wars-by-proxy in behalf of the highest bidders. The Americans' sons and daughters will be shining the shoes and washing the dishes of the very people that their proud parents and grandparents fought. Protesters, kooks, and other loudmouths will be silenced permanently by the Department of Homeland Security and the CIA's clandestine service.

I am an American and proud patriot, but I'll be long-gone before any of the above happens. Noorwegen, hier kom ik!

Nice to see such an insightful post from the archives...

Re:Never said it was

[Dishevel]

Why are you not telling us this wonderful tale of yours in German. The official language of the world since WWII. Oh. Wait. Never mind...

who cares?

[pydev]

These people don't seem to understand that they are competing for limited attention. If the French don't want their literature noticed and accessible by the rest of the world, well, that's their business; the French language is already enough of a barrier to begin with.

France is making themselves more and more irrelevant, and wasting EU 1 billion of French taxpayers' money in the process.

Just curious

[mahadiga]

Is 3-strikes law applicable to Google in France?

Copyright is not absolute, even in France

[jjo]

What the court decided was that Google's actions do not come within the scope of the exceptions to French Copyright law (Article 122-5 of the Code de la propriété intellectuelle). While France does not recognize "fair use" as do some common-law countries such as the USA, it does provide for a number of exceptions which are similar in nature. The court case hinged on whether Google's admitted actions fell within these exceptions.

Corporations should indeed not be above the law, including corporations that hold copyrights.

Oh, yeah, I agree

[Giant Electronic Bra]

I don't the US has been a particularly harsh "master" either. Nor is it really all that correct to say that at any given point in history one group of people really has anything like total control. Really it seems to me that history shows a repeating pattern of dominance by one power, which fails to realize the positive way forward, followed by another which repeats mostly the same mistakes. We would see the reign of the US on the world stage as an example of one of the best sorts of periods in human history overall except for our unique position at the pinnacle of techno-industrial culture. We had both the most impressive means to do good available to any people in history and at the same time face the most serious challenges. I think we were demanded more of than anyone before us in history and we performed only as well as any of the rest. Humanity will pay harshly for that, and yet we shouldn't be judged too harshly. Still, we'll probably go down in history as the society that wrecked the earth. Ah well...

Re:Oh, yeah, I agree

[_Sprocket_]

The thing is, I don't see the US as being any kind of master. It is a powerful nation with far-reaching military, political, economic, and cultural influence. But as pervasive as that influence is, it remains simply influence. It is not a given that the US gets anything it wants. If you look at history and current events, you see other entities with different goals opposing or subverting US influence.

The current state of the world is definitely affected by US actions. But it is very limiting to only view events based on US activity. I see that a lot in US criticism - events presented as if the US acted within a vacuum. That presents a very distorted view of the world (one ripe for manipulation by propagandists).

Whether the US has done "good" with it's power or not is up to debate. But good debate will include a wide view of events.

Re:Oh, yeah, I agree

[Giant Electronic Bra]

I think you miss a lot of the details of what goes on. You only get a very 10,000 foot view of things at best from the news media, if they even report something at all.

Look at the details of the kinds of low level agreements the US makes with other countries. Look at the way we refuse to participate on an equal basis in major areas of international law. The US is not often willing to live by the same rules it wants the rest of the world to follow. Go to some of these developing countries and look at what's actually going on on the ground. Its a LOT uglier than you think.

I'm not really a believer in some kind of "the US is evil" meme. In a lot of cases its the opposite, but at the same time the way we operate when it comes down to the details is like its a zero sum game.

Look at most of the money we supposedly contribute to development overseas. 86% or so of it is tied up with stipulations that it has to be spent HERE. Oh, you can have this 50 million $ to build X piece of infrastructure, but you have to hire Bechtel to do all the work, at some ridiculously inflated prices and all the jobs go to overseas contractors.

Of course there are a whole slew of things we never get credit for either, but there's a heck of a lot of arm twisting that goes on. And a heck of a lot of supporting of some very shady people that do a lot of very shady things behind the scenes.

Re:Oh, yeah, I agree

[_Sprocket_]

Look at the details of the kinds of low level agreements the US makes with other countries. Look at the way we refuse to participate on an equal basis in major areas of international law. The US is not often willing to live by the same rules it wants the rest of the world to follow. Go to some of these developing countries and look at what's actually going on on the ground. Its a LOT uglier than you think.

Oh, I don't think it's all that pretty at all. Like I noted, the world is a rough and violent place. The US has operated in that world, competing with interests, and has done ugly things in some situations. But that doesn't make the US lord and master of the world.

And yes - the US is very influential. It uses that influence to strike favorable exchanges. I'm sure some of those are incredibly one-sided. The question is how those bargains were made.

The devil's in the details. Generalities fail at this point. There are some situations that I'd be willing to defend and some that I would find inexcusable. My issue is that some criticisms seem to consider every situation inexusable.

Look at most of the money we supposedly contribute to development overseas. 86% or so of it is tied up with stipulations that it has to be spent HERE. Oh, you can have this 50 million $ to build X piece of infrastructure, but you have to hire Bechtel to do all the work, at some ridiculously inflated prices and all the jobs go to overseas contractors.

Aren't those earmarks? If so - welcome to the world of Congressional spending. This isn't the US lording power over disadvantaged nations. This is business as usual for Congress. They do the exact same thing within US borders as well. Check out NASA's budget. In fact, the CAIB Report even has a little sub-section talking about how earmarks impact NASA's budget (indirectly causing the Columbia incident).

Of course there are a whole slew of things we never get credit for either, but there's a heck of a lot of arm twisting that goes on. And a heck of a lot of supporting of some very shady people that do a lot of very shady things behind the scenes.

Again - the world is a dangerous and violent place. Such a world is full of shady folks doing shady things. You aren't going to operate in such an environment without bumping up against some of them.

Re:Oh, yeah, I agree

[Giant Electronic Bra]

Yeah, I'm just saying, when you look at it from the perspective of people on the other end of it, they see something that doesn't always look good. Eh, ultimately someone always has to get the blame for whatever isn't right with the world.

I've got so much Karma

[Giant Electronic Bra]

They can mod all they want. As soon as it falls below infinite I just get handed a big wad of mod points, lol.

The grass is always greener...

[Giant Electronic Bra]

It is pretty hard to say which is governing better. The US system just seems rather slow to adapt.

Personally I think we could use a major reformulation of institutions over here right now, but then again I'm not sure I think there's a process for doing that which wouldn't create something worse.

Strike One?

[BSalita]

Does this count under the French three strike rule? I bet it will. Nothing like a good threat to extract the upper hand in negotiations. I'll bet some mouthy minister takes up the threat to cut off Google's Internet access under the three strike rule. Nationalism, populism and greed will surely overpower any talk about citizen's benefits. The big loser is not Google, it's the citizens of France.

Re:Never said it was

[Grishnakh]

Oh, I see. You're just on the everything-that-America-does-is-bad bandwagon.

So you think that overthrowing democracies and installing puppet dictatorships is a good thing? You're exactly what's wrong with America.

No, the US hasn't gotten any worse since WW2 - if anything they've gotten better. The only thing that's changed is popular opinion. If people in the 40's had thought the way that you do now, they'd have been condemning the US for turning Germany and Japan into puppet states, and would have been demanding that Truman be prosecuted for war crimes.

There's a big difference there: Germany and Japan attacked the US. Latin American countries, Vietnam, etc. never attacked the USA.

Also, Germany and Japan have democratically-elected governments, not dictatorships. We only set up dictatorships in Latin American countries and Iran. The CIA didn't exist back in WWII, and they're the ones mostly guilty of these things.

Re:Never said it was

[Grishnakh]

It's really rather pathetic how some Americans keep turning to America's actions way back in WWII (long before they were born) every time they have to defend America's actions. A lot of shit has happened in the 60+ years since then.

I guess you're one of those people who thinks we'd all be speaking Vietnamese if we hadn't "defended" ourselves from Vietnam in the 60s, since they were such a huge threat.

Re:Never said it was

[c6gunner]

So you think that overthrowing democracies and installing puppet dictatorships is a good thing? You're exactly what's wrong with America.

If I were an American, that might be offensive; as it is, you're just blowing smoke.

There's a big difference there: Germany and Japan attacked the US. Latin American countries, Vietnam, etc. never attacked the USA.

Germany attacked the US? Wow. All that time studying history, and I somehow managed to miss that. I feel like such a fool.

Also, Germany and Japan have democratically-elected governments, not dictatorships. We only set up dictatorships in Latin American countries and Iran.

Last I checked, Castro, Chavez, and Ahmedinejad weren't put in power by the US. But, seeing as how I was wrong about the whole "Germany-didn't-attack-the-US" thing, I suppose I could be right out to lunch on that one too. This is why I come to slashdot - to learn new things!

Re:Never said it was

[Grishnakh]

Germany attacked the US? Wow. All that time studying history, and I somehow managed to miss that. I feel like such a fool.

As well you should.

The US merchant marine was involved in trans-Atlantic shipping prior to Pearl Harbor, and was attacked repeatedly by the Germans. Additionally, the USS Reuben James was sunk by Germany, the first US Navy ship sunk in a hostile action in WWII.

http://www.usmm.org/ww2.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Reuben_James_(DD-245)

Maybe instead of being such an ass, you will start feeling like the fool you are now.

Last I checked, Castro, Chavez, and Ahmedinejad weren't put in power by the US.

Try reading about the Shah of Iran, who greatly predates two of those three (or all three, depending on which Castro you're talking about. Fidel is no longer in power.)

Undoing wrong moderation - do not read

[langarto]

This comment is to undo a wrong moderation. Slashdot interface sucks.

Google is too big to fail ...

[alphan1L0]

... or intend to be. If digitizing books is found legal, others should get the same technology, and prepare for it right now. All these books in all languages may improve search engines, translators, and even feed "chatterbots" with knowledge (AI). The french should do the same and sue google to save time. But I live in France and I have never heard about any project to consolidate french informatics. French software is about industrial computer science but is invisible in informatics. France can loose at defending her culture herself. The best example is that giant magnetoresistance is a french discovery but this resistance has been applied and copyrighted by the americans, and now google uses its petabytes storage cloud to sell to the french their own books ...

Re:Never said it was

[c6gunner]

That's the best you've got? German subs sinking a couple merchant ships which were delivering military supplies to their enemy?

Please tell me you're not serious.

As for the last bit, you clearly missed the point, so I'll lay it out for you: nations where the US has propped up dictators have traditionally been ruled by dictators. Supporting one dictator over another is a "crime" whose offensiveness is rather underwhelming. Considering that the US has been directly responsible for the rise of democracy in the two most successful eastern nations, it's rather silly to get your panties in a bunch over their foreign policy. I would, of course, prefer that all civilized nations encourage the rise of democracy in all oppressive nations. However, while such an ideal is desirable, it is impractical and unrealistic. Sometimes we have to back Our asshole over Their asshole, regardless of how detestable they may both be.