Ninth Circuit upholds use of thumbnails in a search engine as fair use under copyright law but reverses on issue of whether use of full-sized images was fair use.

[Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corp., 2003 U.S. App. LEXIS 13562 (9th Cir. July 7, 2003)]

Arriba Soft operates an Internet search engine that displays its search results in the form of low-resolution thumbnail pictures. By clicking on the thumbnail, the user could view a larger version of the same picture within Arriba Soft's Web page. Arriba developed a program that crawls the Internet looking for images to index. The program then creates smaller images. Once the smaller, lower-resolution thumbnail picture is created, the Arriba program deletes the full-sized original from its server. Although users can copy the thumbnails to their own computers, users cannot increase the resolution of the thumbnail without a loss of clarity of the …