International Copyright (France Case)

As stated earlier, there are no international copyright laws. This makes it especially difficult to understand if a work that is under public domain in one country, is also in the public domain in another.

In December of 2009, a French court ruled that Google must immediately stop scanning because Google had infringed copyrights by digitizing books and placing the extracts online without authorization.  The publishing group, La Martiniere, brought suite claiming that they were being exploited because Google Books offers the abstracts online when they do not have the authority to reproduce the books.

The court ruled that Google must pay pay over 300,000 euros, or $430,000, in damages and interest and to stop digital reproduction of the material. The company was also ordered to pay 10,000 euros a day in fines until it removed extracts of some French books from its online database.