The English High Court has thrown out a lawsuit that looked to hold Google liable for copyright infringement over third-party ‘hotlinks’.

Christopher Wheat operated the website theirearth.com, which featured articles on ecology and sustainability-related issues, as well as original photographs by Wheat.

Wheat sued Google after an aggregator site ‘hotlinked’ his copyright-protected photograph of racing driver Lewis Hamilton, which was originally displayed on theirearth.com.

‘Hotlinking’ does not involve copying an image, but rather links to the original host website and displaying the source data directly from that site’s server.

According to Wheat, Google saved a copy of, or cached, the aggregator website which hotlinked his photograph and displayed it at the top of image search results for Lewis Hamilton’s name.

The Google results linked to the hotlinking website, but not theirearth.com, where Wheat’s original photograph was stored, the suit claimed.

According to Wheat, Google should be held liable for copyright infringement. But the English High Court disagreed, last week dismissing his appeal from a lower court which also ruled in favour of the search engine operator.

In the Jan 15 judgment, the English High Court rejected that any alleged wrongdoing by Google came under the remit of copyright law.

Reiterating the lower court’s prior decision, the high court said that “the complaint that Google has prioritised one website over another does not give rise to a claim for copyright infringement”.

The high court also dismissed Wheat’s argument that Google had “attributed” his image or copyright to the hotlinking website, a claim which the high court said was “plainly wrong”.

Source: World IP Review