Copyright Law

Record Label Sues Google, Microsoft for Copyright Infringement

By Jared Moya

Blues Destiny Records argues that Rapidshare allows users to illegally download copies of copyrighted music, and that Google and Microsoft profit from it by allowing links to it to appear in their search engine results.

Blues Destiny Records, a small blues music-oriented record label, has filed suit in a North Florida District Court accusing Google and Microsoft of facilitating and contributing to the copyright infringement of their works for allowing links to Rapidshare to appear prominently in their search results.

“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 authorization from Plaintiff,” reads the suit.

The record label claims that they 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.

But, what Blues Record Labels fails to understand is that Google and Microsoft don’t link to copyrighted material directly, but rather link to a link on Rapidshare, meaning that Rapidshare is the one it really needs to target.

Better yet, how about targeting the real culprits – blues fan who insist on uploading and downloading music for free.

Stay tuned.

jared@zeroapid.com

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on December 11, 2009 (boomark / email).