French Court Finds Google Guilty

21 December 2009


Search engine giant Google has been found guilty of copyright when it digitised books and put extracts online for browsers to read.


French publishers, La Martiniere group, took the giant to court arguing that publishers and authors were losing out in Google's digital project, as they were not sufficiently compensating the writers and publishers of the works.


Google has been ordered to pay 300,000 euros in damages and must immediately stop scanning any copyrighted material by French publishers that they have not made a deal with.


The search engine has announced that it will be appealing the decision.