french copyright case

There was a lot of press recently when the Tribunal de Grande Instance de Paris 3ème chambre, 2ème section released its ruling of December 18, 2009 in the case involving Google and several publishers and authors.

The case raised the interesting issue as to whether Google’s digitization of copyrighted works of French origin and making extracts of them available in response to searches without the permission of authors infringes copyright under the law of France.

What makes the case particularly interesting is that Google’s digitization of the books took place in the United States and the extracts were made available from servers in the United States to users worldwide including France.  …