October 14th, 2008
Google will appeal German copyright decision
In a decision that directly conflicts with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals’ interpretation (Perfect10 v. Google, PDF), a German court has ruled that Google’s display of a thumbnail image of a photographer’s work violates his copyright.
“It doesn’t matter that thumbnails are much smaller than original pictures and are displayed in a lower resolution,” the Regional Court of Hamburg said in its ruling for photographer Michael Bernhard. “By using photos in thumbnails, no new work is created,” that may have justified displaying them without permission. ]Wired]
Google vowed to appeal the decision but in 2006 it ultimately lost a case against the Belgium newspaper group Copiepresse and had to remove the papers’ content from Google News.
“Google is disappointed and intends to appeal the ruling to the German Supreme Court because we believe that services like Google Image Search are entirely legal… Today’s decision is very bad for Internet users in Germany, it is a major step backwards for German e-business in general, and it is bad for the thousands of websites who receive valuable traffic through Image Search and similar services.” [PaidContent]
In 2007, in Perfect 10, the Ninth Circuit held that Google could assert fair use in transforming a website’s images into thumbnails. “The significantly transformative nature of Google’s search engine, particularly in light of its public benefit, outweighs Google’s superseding and commercial uses of the thumbnails in this case,” the court said.
