Google is suing a small record company that previously sued Google over its links to copyrighted works hosted on Rapdishare. Google Inc. v. Blues Destiny Records, LLC was filed April 28 in a California district court.

It’s a potentially important issue at hand: As Billboard explains, Google is asking the court to declare that the links in its search results (to copyrighted material) don’t constitute a copyright violation.

Blues Destiny Records sued Google, Microsoft, and Rapidshare last year. The company said Google and Bing were helping Rapidshare distribute copyrighted works because the songs were easy to find in search results. The record label dropped its suit in March, but refused Google’s request to waive its right to refile the same lawsuit in the future. That refusal seems to have prompted Google to go on the offensive in trying to protect its search results from future lawsuits.

It’s somewhat similar to a previous case concerning the display of image thumbnails in Google’s search results. Back in 2007, a U.S. circuit court ruled in Google’s favor, saying Google was not violating copyright by showing thumbnail versions of copyrighted images in its search results.

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Google: Legal | Legal: Copyright

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