Stop!Google has stumbled a step in its path towards world domination after a court in France ruled that the search engine company is breaking French law with its Google Books project, handing down a daily fine equivalent to $15,000 until the data in question is completely removed.

The case marks yet another instance in which the European Union and its member nations have exhibited a more progressive stance on copyright protection, and more aggressive stance against corporate interests, as evidenced by their recent $1.5 billion fine against Microsoft.

Legislative complexity is part of the game when you’re operating internationally, and what might fly here in the Wild West is considered downright uncouth to our more refined European friends. The ruling is ubdoubtedly encouraging to authors, but it might not portend well for libraries that want to make their collections available in electronic format. Many of the items in the Google Books project come from research institutions such as the McHenry Library at UC Santa Cruz, which has shipped its entire collection of 1.5 million books to Google for digitization.

Google’s liability in the French case likely stems from the fact that they operate the infrastructure and host all the data on their equipment, libraries may have to think twice about the ramifications of making digitized content available to users through the Web, at least when they are running the infrastructure and hosting the data themselves, as opposed to simply pointing to another Web site with hyperlinks.

And of course, on an ethical level it brings up the principle of respecting intellectual property laws, and the larger question of whether members of a national organization such at the ALA are beholden to respect the intellectual property laws of countries, especially when they differ from the laws in our country.

Welcome to the global economy!