Google was convicted of breaching copyright over online French books on Friday last week. A judge ruled that Google must pay £300,000 in damages and interest to a French publisher with a further £10,000 per day until it removes the extracts from it’s database.

Googles’ plans to scan millions of books to make them available on line has drawn critism from publishers and libraries worldwide.

The head of the French Publishers Union said he was completely satisfied with the verdict, saying that “It shows Google that they are not kings of the world and they can’t do whatever they want.”

Serge Eyrelles, president of Frances Syndicat National de L’Edition further said that Google had scanned 100,000 French books into it’s database, of which 80% were still under copyright.

Google defended it’s publication of the excerpts of copyrighted material in September, but this was argued against by lawyers, who said that using excerpts without permission “is a bad representation of the works”.

American authors and publishers have also recently sued Google for the same reason.

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