Google seeks ruling against record label to squash infringement claims

It may not be the sort of landmark ruling we were hoping for, but Google seems intent on making at least some progress in the dreaded copyright infringement debate, and they're using an unlikely tool to do it -- a lawsuit filed against Google.

Not long ago, a small and basically unheard-of record company called Blues Destiny Records made waves by suing Google, Microsoft and Rapidshare. Their complaint was that the two companies' search engines provided links to infringing material on Rapidshare in search results. Microsoft quickly pulled the offending search results from Bing, but Google stood firm. Rapidshare just kept existing like usual.

But the suit filed by Blues Destiny was apparently so badly prepared that it couldn't stand on its own in court, so the company withdrew from the legal proceedings and staunchly declared that they'd return to sue Google when they get their affairs in order.

That was the end of March, and now Google's decided to take the fight to them instead of waiting.

Techdirt recently noticed a tweet posted by Eric Goldman, a law professor over in Mountain View, stating that Google had officially filed a complaint for declaratory relief -- they want the court to rule on the case that Blues Destiny abandoned.

The complaint:

Like I said earlier, it's not exactly a landmark case, but a definitive ruling on this case would set at least some precedent for future dealings regarding search results, whether they be on Bing, Google, Yahoo, or any other search engine. BDR may have tucked tail and ran, but they opened a potential Pandora's Box and it's important to finish what they started before a bigger record label decides to have an army of well-funded lawyers give it a second try.

Tags: bing, copyright infringement, CopyrightInfringement, google, law, microsoft, search engines, SearchEngines