For Search Engines: Thumbnails of images from other sites are legal

[darnell]

See: http://www.law.com/cgi-bin/gx.cgi/Ap...&showsummary=0

Basically a search engine that held thumbnails of a web site's images was sued. The site that owned the images said it violated US Copyright laws for the search engine to have copies of their images. The court ruled in favor of the search engine because the images were thumbnails and not full sized images and were used to help find information. So they could not be viewed at full size or enjoyed/sold like the full sized images.

The ruling really gives no definition on what a thumbnail is, except to say it is smaller and of a lower resolution than the original. And the thumbnail is not something people could really enjoy for artistic value like the orginal.

Pretty interesting ruling...