Using Thumbnails of Copyrighted Images is Fair Use
Adult magazine Perfect 10 earlier filed a copyright infringement claim against Google alleging that Google was crawling the Perfect10.com website and created thumbnails of copyrighted images that were later displayed in Google Image search results.
Google did store the thumbnails but argued that image thumbnails were protected under the copyright doctrine of fair use.
Now a court has also said that using thumbnail-sized images of pictures does not constitute infringement, even when the images are copyrighted.
This seems a fairly logical conclusion but how small can a a thumbnail image be to be considered as fair use?
The definition says that thumbnail images have a length of around 80 to 200 pixels - if small web publishers resize commercial pictures to that size, will it be regarded as “fair use”?
Related: Pictures Thumbnails in Google
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You’d be on very dodgy ground testing this law to its limits. I’d rather leave that to someone else than risk using thumbnails and claiming fair use. There are so many ways to find free images or images with CC licenses anyway that there’s really no need to steal someone else’s pictures. That said, a recent guest blog post about copyright abuse on my Sig Figs blog reveals that the likes of Getty may actually be abusing their position and re-selling old images that are out of copyright as if they were theirs to sell.
db
If you are google, then everything you do, will look fair to you and you will also make courts and judges to see fairness in what you do…….it is as simple and that is what google does…
I think most courts will factor in the intent of the “thumbnail” in evaluating it. Google is trying to auto-generate an index of images designed to send the user elsewhere… if I throw a bunch of scaled-down images on my blog, on the other hand, I’m trying to draw users *to* me and suggest some sort of authority or ownership related to those images.
So can i use vector images of the thumbnail size and then scale and display them? Will that infringe copyright?