Paris Court Punishes Google For Copyright Violation

January 2nd, 2010 by Steve Evans

Internet search giant Google has been found guilty of infringing French copyright law by a court in Paris. French publisher, La Martiniere, received 300,000 Euros ($ 430,000) in damages and interest. Google was also ordered to pay the sum of 10,000 Euros ($ 14,000) each day until it withdraws the book extracts from its database. The court hearing was instigated by the French Publishers’ Association, La Martiniere and SGDL – an author’s group – who had asked that Google be fined 15m Euros ($ 21m).

The size of the final settlement is trivial for Google – but there may yet be implications for Google’s plans to scan and make available online as many of the world’s books as possible. At the moment Google is in the process of scanning and digitising pretty much any book it can get hold of. Out of copyright books are made available in their entirety. Books which remain in copyright either have snippets of them made available online or have the complete book made available under a licensing scheme.

It’s not the first time Google has found itself in court as a result of their ambitious plan to become the world’s digital librarian. A class action was filed against Google Books by the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a number of individual authors and publishers in 2001. Google had, they claimed, broken copyright laws by scanning books from university libraries without getting permission from the copyright owners in certain cases.

At the time, Google maintained that it was working within the “fair use” principle as only short snippets of books scanned without the permission of copyright holders were made available.

In2008 a deal was struck with Google setting up a $ 125 million fund to compensate authors whose books were made available online. However, the deal applied in North America only and raised problems with books which, although out of copyright in the USA, were still bound by copyright law in other parts of the world.

As well as opposition from Europe, including both the governments of France and Germany, Google now faces pressure from Amazon, Microsoft and Yahoo who support the “Open Book Alliance” being driven by the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is a non-profit organisation which is also involved in scanning books. Up to now, they have scanned in excess of 500,000 volumes, all of which are available free. Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, has voiced his concerns that Google seems to be attempting to monopolise the library system.

Google argues that their project will make millions of out of print books, which would otherwise be inaccessible to the majority of readers, available. Users of the Amazon Kindle reader can also access out of copyright free Kindle ebooks via Amazon’s Kindle store and there are a number of other projects which make certain books available at no charge online. It does seem probable that our literary habits will alter and the method of both book storage and delivery will be updated for the digital age. However, before that can take place it will be necessary to ensure that the legal framework is in place and that author’s and other copyright holders are not disadvantaged.