Google Thumbnails Illegal Declares German Court

[GhostShip]

This is a suprise 

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20081013-german-court-google-image-thumbnails-infringe-on-copyright.html

As much as people complain about the challenges of balancing copyrights and fair use in the US, overseas courts have been happy to provide examples that remind us that some aspects of US copyright law are actually fairly liberal. The latest such reminder comes courtesy of a case in Germany that revisits an issue that appears settled in the US: the right of image search services to create thumbnails from copyrighted works to display with the search results. The German courts have now determined that this is not OK in Germany, where Google has just lost two copyright suits over image thumbnails.

I can see this being a major annoyance to Google, no doubt they will bring some new ideas to the table to get around this until their new offshore data-havens are created and make regional laws a mute point for them.

[White Stripes]

all that the sites that dont want their images thumbnailed and are filing suit have to do is add;

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Disallow: /

to their robots.txt file.....

* Silver Stripes wipes sweat from brow

wow... that was hard...

did they not RTFM?