Google Off the Hook for Its Images in France

The Paris Court of Appeal decided in late January that Google was not liable to the holders of copyright in images found through the search engine, for publishing their images or for contributing to infringing uses of the images. A summary of the decision (in French) is here.

The court held that both Google Inc and its French subsidiary were subject to the jurisdiction of the court, and that the searches had occurred in France. However, the images located by Google were those on the publicly accessible sites of the content owners. Google could not be held responsible for what searchers did with the images, any more than if the searchers had found the site by other means. In any event Google posted a warning with its search results saying that the images might be protected by copyright.

If the content owners did not want to have their images found through Google, they could use readily-available software (presumably robot.txt) to turn away Google’s web crawlers so the sites would not be indexed.

This seems like the right result to me, and it’s interesting that it comes from a French court, since the French courts have been (in my impression) very hard on search engines and auction sites under trade mark law. Why should there be a difference in principle? Even links to newspaper stories have been sanctioned in some European courts, have they not?

Is there Canadian law on copyright on searches for images? I recall a lot of litigation a few years ago in the US by Perfect 10 publications against search engines. My recollection is that the publisher lost.

Is that the right result? How else can one run a web search? Is this one more example of people seeing that broad deep revenue stream at Google and wanting to get their ladles into it?