Now that the Google and its fellow search engines are possibly heading for a new form of liability in the UK, what’s life like for search engine providers in Germany? Well, as usual, it’s complicated.

The question of Google’s responsibility for what one may find when searching for a particular set of terms has been dealt with by a variety of court decisions on appeal court level (our “Oberlandesgerichte”) and even once by the German Supreme Court (Bundesgerichtshof). Interestingly, though, the problem that one would think is the most common problem that people have with the search engine phenomenon has not really been dealt with by the courts. We know that Google is generally allowed to display thumbnails of copyrighted images on its image search site. We have been informed that Google is not liable for the “snippets” that appear as a result of one’s search. But we don’t know what Google is required to do (if anything) when being informed of a clear violation of someone’s, say, protected private sphere committed on the internet and spread through tools like Google’s search engine. Continue reading →