Gate Articles

Google, the internet search giant, has been found guilty of infringing French copyright law by a court in Paris. French publishing house, La Martiniere, was awarded the sum of 300,000 Euros (equivalent to $ 430,000). Google must also pay an additional 10,000 Euros ($ 14,000) each day until the book extracts are withdrawn from Google’s database. The action was initiated by the French Publishers’ Association, as author’s group and La Martiniere.

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. Google is currently in the process of scanning and digitising pretty much any book it can get its hands on. 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 whole book made available under a licensing scheme.

It’s not the first time that Google has had to go to court regarding their plan to make books available in a digital library. The Author’s Guild, the Association of American Publishers and a number of independent publishers and individual authors filed a class action against Google in 2001. They alleged that Google had breached copyright law by digitising books from university libraries without, in some cases at least, seeking the consent of the copyright holders.

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 a deal was struck with Google establishing a $ 125 million fund to compensate authors whose works 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.

In addition to opposition from Europe, including both the French and German governments, Google also faces competition from Microsoft, Amazon and Yahoo who support 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, quite reasonably, asserts that their Google Books project will make millions of books which are currently out of print available to readers worldwide. It’s also noteworthy that out of copyright books are available to Amazon Kindle reader users direct from Amazon’s website and that there are numerous other websites where free books can be found online, without any copyright infringement. Our reading habits, along with publishing methods, will change to take advantage of the internet and digital storage media. However, in order for this to be truly successful, a legal framework to protect the interests of copyright holders and authors will require to be put in place.

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