Los Angeles Times reports that a Paris court ruled Google’s book-digitization project violates France’s copyright laws. Google will be fined 10,000 euro per day for as long as it continues showing digitized material. The company was also ordered to pay $430,000 to French publisher La Martiniere, which led a class action-like lawsuit on behalf of a group of local publishers.
The U.S. Google Books settlement is still under legal review. Photographic organizations that recently requested to join the lawsuit have been denied on the grounds that the request was made too late, years into a litigation that focused on textual material alone. Google representatives have said the company did not intend to display images as part of its new online book archive; however, language to that effect had not previously made it into the settlement documents.