Google’s projects are not always full of praises; it has also seen its own set of criticisms and legal barriers. Recently News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch had blamed Google for stealing content from them and now Google’s Book project has received a major setback in a legal battle. A Paris court has found Google Inc guilty of breaking copyright laws of France by digitizing thousands of French books. The largest publishing house of France, La Martiniere had accused Google of scanning around 4,000 of its books without due permission. The court has asked Google to pay 300,000 euro in damages to the publishing house and also to pay euro 10,000 per day until it removes the extracts of books from its database.

Google has also been banned for further scanning of French books without the consent of publishers. French publishers hail the court victory by saying

It shows Google that they are not the kings of the world and they can’t do whatever they want.

It is major blow to the Google’s ambitious goal of creating a huge virtual library by digitizing all the books of the world (around 50 million to 100 million) and to bring them to a common place. Google has so far scanned around 10 million books. This is not the first time that the Google Book is under a legal battle. US publishers have also sued Google for copyright violations but they have reached some sort of agreement.

It should be a wake up call for Google. The vision of Google books to bring millions of  books at one common place is awesome but the implementation will be a real tough job for them. For each and every country they will face different set of barriers. Google is open and they have to realize that the whole world is not. So, they have to frame some middle path in order to realize their vision and to make it a success.

Via (The New York Times)

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