Sydney Morning Herald: 'French publisher sues Google for piracy'

Google’s book-based implementation of its general mission, “to digitize the world's books in order to make

them easier for people to find,” is the subject of a lawsuit in France, according to The Sydney Morning Herald:

A French publishing group is suing the US search engine Google for piracy over its controversial effort to digitise millions of books for online viewing.

La Martiniere, which owns publishers Le Seuil in France, Delachaux and Niestle in Switzerland and Harry N. Abrams in the United States, accuses Google of "counterfeiting and breach of intellectual property rights".

The lawsuit, to be filed in a Paris court, targets both Google France and its parent company, the US group Google Inc.

Eric Schmidt, CEO, Google, in his “Books of Revelation,” The Wall Street Journal, October 18, 2005, said of Google Print, now Google Books:

Imagine sitting at your computer and, in less than a second, searching the full text of every book ever written.

La Martiniere apparently doesn’t want to imagine it, at least not without monetary compensation.

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