Fights back against Blues Destiny Record’s claim that it’s facilitating and contributing to the copyright infringement of its works for allowing links to illegal copies to appear prominently in its search results.
Last December Blues Destiny Records (BDR), a small blues music-oriented record label, filed suit in a North Florida District Court accusing Google and Microsoft of facilitating and contributing to the copyright infringement of its works for allowing links to Rapidshare to appear prominently in their search results.
The record label claims it sent DMCA notices to both Google and Microsoft asking that they remove, block, and filter links to their copyrighted works and that both failed to do so. By allowing the links to appear in their search results they “thus intentionally contribute a gateway for Internet users to directly infringe” their material.
The label decided to “voluntarily dismiss its action without prejudice” this past March, but refused to waive its right to pursue its copyright allegatiosn in the future. According to Google, as of April the the label’s attorney ” reiterated BDR’s belief that it had valid copyright claims against Google, that BDR was considering its option on whether it would seek relief against Google, but did not provide a definitive answer regarding whether or when BDR intended to re-file.”
Google, wanting to settle the matter once and for all, has now decided to take BDR to court to refute Blues Destiny Records claims of copyright infringement.
In a brief submitted to the court it emphasizes that it always “responded expeditiously to BDR’s DMCA-compliant notifications of claimed infringement by removing, or disabling access to, links leading to webpages allegedly containing material infringing BDR’s copyrights.”
This places Google squarely under the protection of the DMCA’s “safe harbor” provision.
The decision in this trial — if it even gets that far– could mean a lot to copyright owners as well as Google. If Google can win this case and get favourable treatment on appeal, it could go a long way towards clearing a big chunk of its potential copyright liability.
Stay tuned.
They should have never let anything control search results from the very beginning, and stood on the computer rankings of sites, and the results being free speech. Once Goog started hand editing results they went corrupt, even though their search is still probably the best.