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Danny Sullivan has the detailed write up on French Lawsuit Over Google Book Search. Basically, a French publishing group is to sue Google for publishing book excerpts online without permission. But is it without permission? :)
The group's web site, it should be noted, has 919 pages listed in Google, all of which are protected by copyright, all of which Google and other search engines index without explicit permission -- and all of which the group apparently doesn't object to, since it doesn't seem to have banned indexing using a robots.txt file (the site is down, so I can't verify this first hand -- but the pages really are unlikely to be listed if this were the case). But do the same thing with a print book -- copy for indexing purposes rather than reprinting -- and suddenly, that's infringement. Well, the courts will sort it out.
Forum discussion at DigitalPoint Forums.
