zlacker

>is the results page a possible liability for Google?

That's actually a tricky question and lengthy court battles were held over this in both the US and Europe. In the end, all courts decided that the image result page is questionable when it comes to copyright, but generally covered by fair use. The question is how far fair use goes when people are using the data in derivative work. Google specifically added licensing info about images to further cover their back, but this whole fair use stuff gets really murky when you have automatic scrapers using google images to train AIs who in turn create art for sale eventually. There's a lot of actors in that process that profit indirectly from the provided images. This will probably once again fall back to the courts sooner or later.

>>sigmoi+(OP)
Europe has no concept of Fair Use. How did the courts argue there?

>>red_tr+X6
Not a lawyer, but from how I understand it the German courts argued that if you don't use any technology to prevent web crawlers from accessing the pictures on your website you need to accept that they are used for preview images (what the Google picture search technically is) as this is a usual use case.

-> here is the actual judgement though: https://juris.bundesgerichtshof.de/cgi-bin/rechtsprechung/do...

>>red_tr+X6
Fair use is just a limitation of copyright in case of public interest. Europe has very similar exclusions, even though they are spelled out more concretely. But they don't make this particular issue any less opaque.