A Paris court has fined Google ^[1] for breaking France’s copyright laws over displaying snippets of books in their search results. The court has fined Google €300,000 (~$430,000) to be paid to French publisher La Martiniere, which filed the court case on behalf of several other publishers.

Google Books has always been in controversy over indexing and has got into trouble in the past for indexing books without explicit permission. Google has been displeased with the court ruling and will be appealing the decision. Google were apparently upset at this decision and released a statement which said:

"French readers now face the threat of losing access to a significant body of knowledge and falling behind the rest of internet users"

In the past Google has signed deals with US publishers to index books, however, the French publishers did not take the indexing too kindly, and claimed that the indexing books was an act of reproduction and Google needs to pay them in order to do it.

It is not very clear whether Google can display those snippets in countries other than France, however the amount does not seem to be a high price to pay for Google. Initially, the French publishers had demanded 1.5 million Euros as compensation, however the actual fine is much lower than that.

Related: Download Books from Google Books ^[2] | Download eBooks from Google ^[3]

Image credit: stanford.edu