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A French court has found internet search giant Google guilty of copyright infringement. La Martiniere, a French publisher, was awarded 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 initiated by the French Publishers’ Association, La Martiniere and SGDL – an author’s group – who demanded that Google be forced to pay 15m Euros ($ 21m).

For Google, the size of the final settlement is trivial – but there may yet be some impact on Google’s plans to scan and make available online as many of the world’s books as possible. Google is currently in the process of scanning and digitising pretty much any book it can get its hands on. 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. 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 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 was applicable in North America only and raised problems with books which, whilst perhaps out of copyright in the USA, were still under copyright law in other parts of the world. 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. However, prior to that happening it may be a requirement to ensure that the legal framework is in place and that authors and other copyright holders are not disadvantaged.

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