Google In Breach Of French Copyright Law
A court in Paris has found internet search giant Google guilty of infringing French copyright law. La Martiniere, a French publisher, was awarded 300,000 Euros ($ 430,000) in damages and interest. Google was also required to pay a fee of 10,000 Euros ($ 14,000) each day until it removes the book extracts from its database. The French Publishers’ Association, La Martiniere and SGDL – an author’s group – inititiated the hearing and demanded 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. Books which are out of copyright are made available in their entirety. Books which are still in copyright either have snippets of them made available online or have the whole book electronically published 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. The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a number of individual authors and publishers filed a class action against Google Books in 2001. Google had, they alleged, breached copyright laws by scanning books from university libraries without getting permission from the copyright owners in some cases.
At the time, Google claimed that it was operating under the “fair use” principle as only short snippets of books scanned without the permission of copyright holders were made available.
In October of 2008 an agreement was reached with Google establishing a $ 125 million fund to compensate authors whose books were made available online. However, the deal applied in North America only and there were problems with books which, even though they were out of copyright in the USA, were still under copyright law in other countries. Over and above opposition from Europe, including the governments of both France and Germany, Google now faces competition from Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon who are supporting the “Open Book Alliance” being driven by the Internet Archive. The Internet Archive is a non-profit organisation which scans and digitises books. To date, they have scanned over half a million books, all of which are available free. Brewster Kahle, the founder of the Internet Archive, feels that Google is attempting to monopolise the library system.
Google has argued that their system will make millions of out of print books, which would otherwise be inaccessible to most readers, available. Users of the Amazon Kindle can also access 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 reading habits are about to undergo major change and the method of both book storage and delivery will be updated to take advantage of the internet and electronic formatting. It will be necessary to ensure that the legal framework is in place before that can happen and that copyright holders and authors are not disadvantaged.
Related Reading:
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
