Paris Court Rules Against Google in Book Copyright Case

Google's book search project suffered a legal setback in Paris  as a court ordered it to pay €300,000 (US$432,000) in damages for breach of copyright, and to stop distributing digital copies of French books to French Internet users without the permission of their publishers.

French publisher La Martinière Groupe filed suit against Google in June 2006, and was later joined in its case by the French Publishers Association (FPA), representing 400 publishing companies. The FPA will be disappointed by the size of the financial penalty: It had asked the court for €500,000 per day.

Google has scanned 10 million books, more than half of them in languages other than English.

Google has faced similar lawsuits elsewhere and is attempting to reach agreement with authors in the U.S. over its scanning of books there. On Nov. 13, with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, it submitted its latest draft to the court of a proposal it hopes will settle a 2005 class-action lawsuit. Opponents of that deal say it gives Google an unfair advantage in the nascent market for digital reproductions of books.