Internet and copyright: German Federal Supreme Court recognize Google image search results legal

The German Federal Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof) has ruled that Google does not infringe copyright when it displays small previews of images from other people’s websites, and thus rejected a suit filed by an artist from Weimar, who claimed that search results, showing thumbnail images of her pictures, violated her copyrights, Deutschland Funk reports.

The decision of the court highlights that the artist herself made her website’s content available for indexing, thus according to Google, she accepted that her pictures would be displayed in the search results as small counterparts of lower resolution.

By the way, lower courts were unable to reach mutual consent regarding this issue, therefore the suit was submitted to the German Federal Supreme Court. In case the claim was satisfied, Google would turn out to commit millions of violations every day by showing copies of images, protected by copyright, in the search results.