• Bloomberg, Tuesday, October 14, 2008 12 PM

Google has lost two lawsuits in Germany over its use of copyrighted images as search thumbnails. Google's preview of a picture by German photographer Michael Bernhard violated his copyrights, ruled a court in Hamburg, and Thomas Horn, who holds the copyrights on some comics that were displayed in Google search results, won a second case.

Google argued that the tiny size and resolution of the thumbnail images that appear when users perform a search protected them from copyright infringement. But the court said such things didn't matter. "It doesn't matter that thumbnails are much smaller than original pictures and are displayed in a lower resolution," the court said in its ruling for Bernhard. "By using photos in thumbnails, no new work is created."

Whether the judgment has repercussions in the U.S. remains to be seen, but the cases do highlight--once again--the natural conflict that arises between the owners of content on companies trying to make that content accessible on the Web.

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