Besides being fined the equivalent of $14,300 for each day in violation, Google was ordered to pay euro300,000 ($430,000) in damages and interest to French publisher La Martiniere, which brought the case on behalf of a group of French publishers.
Google attorney Alexandra Neri said the company would appeal.
The decision erects another legal barrier that may prevent Google from realizing its 5-year-old goal of scanning all the worlds books into a digital library accessible to anyone with an Internet connection.
A U.S. legal settlement that would give Google the digital rights to millions of books is in limbo because U.S. regulators have warned a federal judge in New York that the arrangement probably would thwart competition in the budding electronic book market and compromise copyrights, as well.
The top U.S. copyright official and the governments in Germany and France also have raised objections about that settlement overstepping its bounds. Google is trying to address the critics with a revised settlement that is still under court review.
The French case is relatively small in comparison. It didnt even seem to faze investors as Google shares gained $3.86 to $597.80 in Friday afternoon trading.
Still, the ruling served as a reminder that Googles ambitious push into other markets beyond Internet search increasingly is clashing with fears the Mountain View, Calif., company is getting too powerful.
As part of the backlash, Google has been depicted as a copyright scofflaw that prospers off the content of others – a portrayal the companys management insists is totally off base.
The head of the French publishers union applauded Fridays verdict.
“It shows Google that they are not the kings of the world and they cant do whatever they want,” said Serge Eyrolles, president of Frances Syndicat National de lEdition. He said Google had scanned 100,000 French books into its database, 80 percent of which were under copyright.
Eyrolles said French publishers would still like to work with Google to digitize their books, “but only if they stop playing around with us and start respecting intellectual property rights.”
Philippe Colombet, the head of Googles book-scanning project in France, said the company disagrees with the courts ruling.
Colombet declined to answer questions about whether Google would remove the books from its database or pay the fine. “We are going to study the judgment carefully over the coming days,” he said.
The judgment will have little or no effect on Internet users outside of France. And French books that are in Googles database with publishers consent will remain searchable, even in France. Colombet could not say how many French books Google has scanned overall, or how many French publishers allowing Google to show its works.
Google has scanned more than 10 million books worldwide since 2004, including 2 million with the consent of about 30,000 publishers, About 9,000 of those publishers are in Europe, Colombet said. Another 2 million books in Googles library no longer are in copyright. Google has been only showing snippets from the remaining books while it tries to iron out copyright disputes.
French President Nicolas Sarkozy has made catching up on Frances digital delay one of the national priorities by earmarking euro750 million (about $1 billion) of a euro35 billion spending plan announced earlier this week for digitizing Frances libraries, film and music archives and other repositories of the nations recorded heritage.
Earlier this week a consortium of French technology companies announced a plan to create a book scanning project they said would be better than Googles, but only in three years time.