You're missing the point Nick. The beef is with reproducing the graphic on Google's thumbnail search, not whether Google indexes someone's website.

Regardless, the Germans can enjoy their lovely copyright laws. That country is the seat of the West's media regressiveness.

The fuss is that the copyright holders are not obliged to do that--the onus remains on Google not to copy the material.

If I'm not mistaken can't one just add a comment to the HTML of their web site to prevent the Google spider bot from indexing their web site?