Two days after French president Nicolas Sarkozy — as a Reuters story reports — “pledged nearly $1.1 billion … toward the computer scanning of French literary works, audiovisual archives and historical documents” as a counter to Google Book Search, “A Paris court on Friday found the Internet giant Google guilty of violating copyright by digitizing books and putting extracts online, following a legal challenge by French publishers,” reports a Reuters wire story. The case was brought against Google by the La Martinière publishing group, which owns the Editions du Seuil publishing house, the French Publishers’ Association and the authors’ groups SGDL. According to Reuters, the group “accused Google of scanning the books for free, letting users browse the content for free, reaping revenues from advertisers but not adequately compensating the creators and original publishers,” and “argued that scanning books was an act of reproduction that should be paid for and had demanded that Google be fined 15 million euros.”

The court agreed with the argument, if not the amount of punishment to render out: “It ordered Google to pay 300,000 euros or $431,700 in damages and interest and to stop digital reproduction of the material.” And although Google can appeal, the judge ruled that the penalty be enforced “immediately.”