Ruling may have sweeping implications for search engines.

In a case that may have sweeping implications for search engines of all kinds, a federal judge in California has ruled that a "visual search engine" did not violate copyright laws by collecting thumbnail images of photographs from the Web and displaying them on its site. The necessity of searching the Internet outweighed any other factor in determining whether a copyright was violated, the judge said. In January, a California photographer sued Ditto.com, then known as the Arriba Vista Image Searcher, for violating her copyright by collecting and displaying 35 of her copyrighted images on its site as search results. The Ditto search engine works by "spidering" the Web - having a computer program collect some two million images from any site on the Internet it can find them - then shrinking each image down to a thumbnail image that is displayed in the search result. The photographer argued that an image is an image and displaying her copyrighted photographs without her permission - and making money in the process - was effectively stealing. The U.S. District Court judge in Santa Ana, Calif. ruled that Ditto wasn_t stealing the images. But the 15-page decision, handed down late Thursday, was somewhat more complicated - with the judge effectively giving a split decision on many of the relevant issues. However the judge said that the crucial role search engines serve for users of the Internet outweighs the other factors and makes Ditto_s thumbnails "fair use" of the images.