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Blues label sues Google and Microsoft

By | Published on Monday 14 December 2009

A small US-based blues-focused record label called Blues Destiny Records has named Google and Microsoft as defendants in a lawsuit against European file-sharing service Rapidshare (file-sharing in the yousendit.com sense, rather than the LimeWire/Pirate Bay sense).

They are not the first people to sue Rapidshare for copyright infringement because, of course, some people use the file-sharing platform to share unlicensed music files. While Rapidshare is not a P2P network, so files pumped through their system can only be accessed by people who are given a special URL by the sharer, German collecting society GEMA convinced Germany’s courts that enabling the distribution of unlicensed content was, in itself, infringement. Rapidshare subsequently introduced various filters that in theory stop unlicensed content being shared via their networks, although other sites still list illegally shared content, which then shows up on search engines.

Blues Destiny are suing Google and Microsoft, as well as Rapidshare directly, because they claim the two company’s search engines provide prominent links to Rapidshare URLs that in turn provide unlicensed music. They also allege that both search engine companies have failed to respond to takedown notices they have issued regarding Rapidshare links, under the framework set up by the US’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

The lawsuit says: “Defendants facilitated, materially contributed to, and caused infringement of plaintiff’s copyrighted recordings for defendant’s financial benefit by knowingly and systematically directing internet users, via search results generated by their respective search engines, to the illegal and infringing copies of plaintiff’s recordings on rapidshare.com and similar websites, without authorisation from plaintiff”.

It’s an ambitious lawsuit to say the least, given Rapidshare are arguably already complying with the content filtering obligations set down by the aforementioned DMCA, while US copyright law provides a lot of protection to search engines who link to unlicensed content. Failure to respond to takedown notices does go against the search engines, though it’s possible they failed to respond because they don’t believe such notices relating to Rapidshare links are valid.

None of the defendants have as yet responded to the lawsuit.



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