French court finds Google Guilty of copyright infringement
WinInfo | at | by Mike
A French court has found Google guilty of copyright infringement for its ongoing efforts to scan books and put the content online. The court imposed $430,000 in damages against the online behemoth and ordered it to remove online extracts of books published by French publisher La Martiniere. The court also imposed a daily fine of $14,300, effective until Google pulls La Martiniere extracts from its search results.
Though the French ruling applies only to France and only to a single publisher, it could provide a legal precedent for Google's increasingly controversial book scanning practice. Google began scanning books from US-based libraries five years ago and has now scanned about 10 million volumes; only 2 million of those books were scanned with the explicit consent of publishers, and about 2 million are no longer are in copyright.