German Supreme Court: Google Image Search in line with copyright law

Billions of users across the globe, millions of websites and companies benefit from services that make information available - be it text, video, audio or visual information. Our aim has always been to help users discover this kind of information as quickly and relevantly as possible. Earlier today the German Supreme Court - the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) - issued the written grounds for an important decision (“Vorschaubilder II”) around image search and copyright, encouraging us in our approach.

The court carefully balanced the interests of the copyright holder and users to find content online and it confirmed the right of the author to demand the removal of its copyrighted work from any infringing website. The court also made clear that a search engine is allowed to crawl and to index thumbnails of images that are either made available by the copyright holder himself or by anyone else who was granted a license to make them available

This legal position is in line with the decision introduced in a former case from April 2010 ("Vorschaubilder I" - original here): a copyright holder who makes its work available online without implementing any technical protections against the copying of the work as a thumbnail (e.g. by applying robots exclusion standards) gives its consent to search engines to display the work in the form of a thumbnail. The court expressly broadened its previous jurisdiction now: if a copyright holder has allowed a licensee to display protected works online, the search engine can also rely on the consent of that licensee. With this decision the court has confirmed Google’s long standing position that providing thumbnails in its search results is in line with copyright law.

It is encouraging to see that the five year long period of legal proceedings and legal uncertainty came to an end with a promising outlook: for copyright holders who can control the access to their works, for search engines who are legally allowed to link to third party content and, ultimately, for internet users who can still find the content they are looking for.

Posted by Dr. Arnd Haller, Legal Director, North- and Central Europe