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Google Found Guilty of French Copyright Infringement
adeelarshad82 writes "A Paris court on Friday found Google guilty of violating copyright by digitizing books and putting extracts online, following a legal challenge by major French publishers. The court found against Google after the La Martiniere group, which controls the highbrow Editions du Seuil publishing house, argued that publishers and authors were losing out in the latest stage of the digital revolution."
It agreed to a settlement with some US authors and publishers. Most authors were not involved.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
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!
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
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?
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.
Google wasn't found guilty. They were openly, admittedly, unabashedly guilty of digitizing and putting up excerpts of books they did not hold ANY copyright to.
They only thing that happened was that the court decided the this law is valid even for a mega corp like Google.
THAT, my friends, is the real shocker.
And all you Googlebots can bitch about the law all you want, that's fine. Get the laws changed (in France, here, wherever). But Google brazenly did shit that was completely illegal. I am glad they got hit for it.
Corporations should NOT be above the law.
Google makes unauthorized copies of people's work to store in their servers, in some way similar to how Psystar is found guilty of making unauthorized copies of Mac OS X when it loads it into memory.
Then Google makes money hand over fist from it by selling search results/ads and the people producing the content get nothing or -at best- a very tiny fraction of the income. 'Take from the rich and keep for our own rich selves' sounds a lot like 'do evil' to me.
If your content shows up in Google's results and they make any money off it, then you as the creator of that content should get a portion of that money. Otherwise why do we have copyright laws at all? In a fair world, google and bing should need to set up accounts for each website and pay back a portion of their revenue each time that site's contents appears in a search result with ads in it.
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.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow