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Google with time has started to appear more mortal with time; as it suffers a few setbacks; be it the Yahoo/Google deal, its Street View facing opposition in Germany to the present loss it suffered facing copyright violation. The loss comes at the hands of cases against Google in Germany that point at indexing an artist’s work and putting up a photographer’s photo as a thumbnail in its image search as reported.

The culprit has been a part of such violations for long and it has been pretty casual about such cases. The decision that has been made against Google roots from similar grounds; using work from others without permission to display on its services.

The court giving out its decision against Google said:

It doesn’t matter that thumbnails are much smaller than original pictures and are displayed in a lower resolution.

Now if this is the case then there are billions off images there already and a countless of them might very well be violating copyright laws. The Image Search provides valuable traffic to a countless sites and it does give credit to the owner by providing a link to the source. Also it generates images from across the web for the search results it is highly possible that it can index it from elsewhere.

In its response to the court’s decision, Google has decided to file an appeal stating:

Today’s decision is very bad for Internet users in Germany, it is a major step backwards for German e-business in general, and it is bad for the thousands of websites who receive valuable traffic through Image Search and similar services.

Google’s Street View might be one thing that I can be against but seriously, this one baffles me. If this is right as the court thinks then every other image that it fetches from across the web must be removed as well. And for God’s sake it’s a search engine and it’s not using all this to generate something in its own name.