Google appeals German ban on image search

GOOGANTUA has appealed two court decisions that could ban it from operating image searches in Germany.

Last month a district court in Hamburg ruled in favour of two blokes who claimed the Internet search giant nicked snaps from their Web sites and infringed on their copyrights.

Michael Bernhard, a photographer, and Thomas Horn, who owns the rights to several frames of a comic called Psykoman, won their case and got a ruling that means that Google and three other search engines would have to stop displaying snaps or gain permission to display each copyrighted picture.

Kay Oberbeck, a spokesman for Google in Germany said that Google Image Search is entirely legal as other European courts have supported Google's right to display thumbnail images from other Web sites as search results.

Web site managers could also employ software to block images or text from being picked up by a search engine if they did not want their content to appear on Image Search.

While Google doesn't profit from Google Image Search, thousands of Web sites make a buck or two on being found through searches. These would suffer if Google did not appeal the case.

Google plans to take the case to the Hamburg court of appeal saying they done me wrong... it is the same old song, forever [are you channelling Genesis again? ed]. µ

L'Inq
AP