French publisher sues Google Books

Google Books accused of 'counterfeiting' and 'breach of intellectual property'

French publisher La Martinière Groupe has filed a lawsuit against Google over the search firm's Google Books scanning project. 

The publisher alleges that Google Books amounts to "counterfeiting" and " breach of intellectual property rights", and is demanding damages of €100,000 for each scanned book.

La Martiniere filed its suit in Paris against Google France and Google Inc. The action is the first against the book scanning project in France and the third Google Books lawsuit worldwide. 

The publisher owns the French companies Le Seuil, Delachaux and Niestle in Switzerland, as well as US publisher Harry N Abrams.

Google said in an statement to vnunet.com that it was disappointed that the publisher filed the suit, and vowed to defend itself in court. 

Google Books provides scans of works indexed using optical character recognition technology. The project aims to help users discover new books and inform them where to buy or borrow them, according to Google. 

The service allows users to search for keywords within books, and presents a snippet of the work, displaying only a few sentences.

Google will only display sample pages when it has permission from the publisher. Works that are not under copyright are available in their entirety.

The project has faced opposition from the word go. The firm put Google Books on hold in August, and resumed it in November while offering publishers the ability to opt-out. 

Opponents fear that Google Books will hurt sales and assert that it will expand the dominance of the English language.

As Google is building its digital library, Yahoo and Microsoft are backing the Open Content Alliance. The project is limiting itself to scanning public domain books for now and claims to be talking to copyright holders.