Google Maps Sued by Looters

French cartographers are pissed that Google is giving away their maps for free. They have been unable to sell any of their own maps because they simply can’t run a business, so they went the way of Atlas Shrugs and sued under some Dog Eat Dog clause. Now Google owes these crappy cartographers and their crooked lawyers about 660 Thousand bucks.

From CNET here:

You may like that Google Maps is free, but a French court says it’s actually anticompetitive.
A Paris court earlier this week ordered Google France and its parent company Google to pay plaintiff Bottin Cartographes 500,000 euros (about $660,000) for providing its free mapping services to businesses across the country. The court also required Google to pay a 15,000 euro fine for its practice.

“We proved the illegality of (Google’s) strategy to remove its competitors,” Jean-David Scemmama, attorney for Bottin Cartographes, a company that provides mapping services to businesses, told the AFP in an interview earlier this week. “The court recognized the unfair and abusive character of the methods used, and allocated Bottin Cartographes all it claimed. This is the first time Google has been convicted for its Google Maps application.”

Bottin has been arguing its case against Google for two years, claiming the search giant was engaging in anticompetitive practices by using its free service to take control over the online-mapping industry.

I can see the need for some companies to purchase professionally created maps, and Google isn’t providing those, so I really can’t see how these guys have a case. Google ought to just buy the company and start selling professional paper maps to businesses world wide.