Friday, December 18, 2009

Guilté as Charged: The Great Book Bank Robbery

Google has at last been found guilty of what we all knew they had done - infringed copyright. Instead of running to settle and pick up the coins offered, the French stood firm and resolute. All too often leadership buckles and accepts a settlement, which leaves the case undecided and the guilty to escape unpunished.

A Paris court has found Google guilty of copyright infringement and ordered it to pay 300,000 euros (£266,000) in damages and interest also ordered them to pay 10,000 euros a day until it removes extracts of the books from its database.

French publisher La Martiniere was one of many that also included the French Publishers' Association and authors' group SGDL that took Google to court for digitising its books without explicit permission and launched this court case three years ago.

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