La Martiniere sues Google for breach of intellectual property rights

The French publishing group La Martiniere is suing the search engine giant Google claiming that their book indexing program is equivalent to counterfeiting and breach of intellectual property rights.

La Martiniere owns publishers Le Seuil in France, Delachaux and Niestle in Switzerland and Harry N. Abrams in the United States and this lawsuit has been filed in a court in Paris, France.

The lawsuit is targeting both Google France and its parent company Google Inc based in the USA.

The problem is related to the Google Book search program, which requires Google to scan millions of books available in the libraries around the world. However, this cause problems with the publishers which complain that the search engine company does not take their permission before scanning and digitizing their books.

Google on their part claims that their program falls under the fair use law, as the users are not allowed to see or read the entire book. They are only shown a small part of the content which includes the searched for keyword.

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