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Google to Appeal German Court Ruling
Google has lost two recent copyright infringement lawsuits brought in Hamburg, Germany by a photographer and artist, respectively. In each case the German court found that Google violated copyrights by displaying thumbnail images of the plaintiffs' works in Google's search results. The Court held that permission of the owner is required in order to display such copies of images, and that the mere fact that the thumbnails are smaller and of lower quality did not matter.
The German decisions differ with the results in the U.S. in the Ariba case and, more recently, the Perfect 10 v. Google decision by the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which decided that the social value of Google’s ability to search images and return useful results outweighed the limited interest authors had in small copies (this was in spite of there being evidence before the court of the existence of a market for such copies).
Google plans to appeal the rulings.
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