This website uses cookies so that we can provide you with the best user experience possible. Cookie information is stored in your browser and performs functions such as recognising you when you return to our website and helping our team to understand which sections of the website you find most interesting and useful.
Legal
Google withdraw Blues Destiny lawsuit
By CMU Editorial | Published on Thursday 17 June 2010
Google has withdrawn its legal claim against American independent record company Blues Destiny Records. So that’s nice.
As previously reported, Google went legal last month to get clarification on a side issue that came out of Blues Destiny’s 2009 litigation against German-based file-transfer service RapidShare. Blues Destiny argued RapidShare was guilty of copyright infringement for failing to stop its users from using the file-transfer system to send copyrighted music files without the permission of copyright owner, though the case was settled before it reached court.
In its litigation, Blues Destiny possibly foolishly named Google and Bing as co-defendants, because their search engines sometimes link to RapidShare pages that host infringing content. Google strongly denied it had any liability for copyright infringement by linking to RapidShare web pages, and was disappointed when it didn’t have a chance for that fact to be clarified in court.
Google demanded Blues Destiny give a written commitment to never sue Google over it linking to RapidShare sites ever again, but the record label refused. So Google began its own legal action, asking the Californian courts to confirm it couldn’t have been liable in Blue Destiny’s RapidShare lawsuit, even if the file-transfer service itself was found to be liable.
It is that litigation that Google has confirmed it has called off, seemingly because Blues Destiny agreed to give the search firm the written commitment it desired regarding future legal claims. Google came in for some criticism when it launched its lawsuit because Blues Destiny is a small label. Some bloggers argued the search firm’s lawyers wouldn’t be so keen to go legal if the label involved had been Sony or Universal.
