The Guardian reports that Google has won a victory for its GooglePrint service in Germany. Publisher Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (WBG) argued that the scanning of its works infringed its copyright and that this was actionable in Germany.
The spokesman from the German printers' association (left) could not be reached for comment
However, the Hamburg Regional Court’s copyright chamber told WBG that is application for an injunction was unlikely to succeed. Motivating this finding seems to be the fact that the scanning took place in the US, not Germany, so US law would apply and US law has more generous fair use provisions. Because of the court’s indications, WBG withdrew its application for an injunction.
The IPKat is moderately surprised. He wasn’t expecting Google Print to clock up many copyright victories. However this wasn't an endorsement of the Google Print project - just a finding of no jurisdiction.
GOOGLEPRINT WINS IN GERMANY (KIND OF)
Reviewed by Anonymous
on
Thursday, June 29, 2006
Rating:
No comments:
All comments must be moderated by a member of the IPKat team before they appear on the blog. Comments will not be allowed if the contravene the IPKat policy that readers' comments should not be obscene or defamatory; they should not consist of ad hominem attacks on members of the blog team or other comment-posters and they should make a constructive contribution to the discussion of the post on which they purport to comment.
It is also the IPKat policy that comments should not be made completely anonymously, and users should use a consistent name or pseudonym (which should not itself be defamatory or obscene, or that of another real person), either in the "identity" field, or at the beginning of the comment. Current practice is to, however, allow a limited number of comments that contravene this policy, provided that the comment has a high degree of relevance and the comment chain does not become too difficult to follow.
Learn more here: http://ipkitten.blogspot.com/p/want-to-complain.html