A Paris court has ruled that Google Inc’s expansion into digital books breaks France’s copyright laws, and a judge slapped the Internet search leader with a fine of 10,000 euros (US$14,300) per day until it stops showing literary snippets.
Besides being fined the equivalent of 10,000 euros for each day in violation, Google was ordered on Friday to pay 300,000 euros in damages and interest to French publisher La Martiniere, which brought the case on behalf of a group of French publishers.
Google attorney Alexandra Neri said the company would appeal the ruling.
The decision erects another legal barrier that may prevent Google from realizing its five-year-old goal of scanning all the world’s books into a digital library accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.
A US legal settlement that would give Google the digital rights to millions of books is in limbo because US regulators have warned a federal judge in New York that the arrangement probably would thwart competition in the budding electronic book market and compromise copyrights.
The top US copyright official and the governments in Germany and France also have raised objections about that settlement overstepping its bounds. Google is trying to address the critics with a revised settlement that is still under court review.
The head of the French publisher’s union applauded Friday’s verdict.
“It shows Google that they are not the kings of the world and they can’t do whatever they want,” said Serge Eyrolles, president of France’s Syndicat National de l’Edition.
He said Google had scanned 100,000 French books into its database, 80 percent of which were under copyright.
Eyrolles said French publishers would still like to work with Google to digitize their books, “but only if they stop playing around with us and start respecting intellectual property rights.”
Philippe Colombet, the head of Google’s book-scanning project in France, said the company disagrees with the court’s ruling.
“French readers now face the threat of losing access to a significant body of knowledge and falling behind the rest of Internet users,” Colombet said in a conference call with reporters. “We believe that displaying a limited number of short extracts from books complies with copyright legislation both in France and the US — and improves access to books.”
Colombet declined to answer questions about whether Google would remove the books from its database or pay the fine.
“We are going to study the judgment carefully over the coming days,” he said.
Colombet could not say how many French books Google has scanned overall, or how many French publishers were allowing Google to show its works.
Google has scanned more than 10 million books worldwide since 2004, including 2 million with the consent of about 30,000 publishers, About 9,000 of those publishers are in Europe, Colombet said.
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