In December 2009, a tiny music label that specializes in the blues and is based in Destin, Florida, had enough of online piracy and decided to sue... Google?

Yes, the music label sued the search giant because Google linked to infringing copies of the label's music hosted by one-click download site RapidShare. According to the lawsuit, the president of Blues Destiny Records spent November 17, 2009 Googling his own bands. In numerous cases, the very first links returned by Google were to music hosted on RapidShare.

"Although Google could screen or block access to websites known for hosting infringing music content, apparently they have chosen not to," said the complaint.

Although legal questions here are not entirely settled, the label was certainly taking a huge chance. Writing back in December, law professor Eric Goldman summed up the case by saying, "Given the ambiguities of that opinion, the plaintiff's action here isn't clearly wrong as a doctrine matter. However, in my opinion, it is nevertheless ill-advised and unlikely to succeed."

Stranger than the decision to go after Google was the label's simultaneous decision to go after Microsoft's Bing search engine, despite the fact that "Bing removed from its search result the links to websites offering illegal copies of Plaintiff's Recordings" before the lawsuit was even filed.

Google takes such lawsuits seriously; by trying to restrict the company's linking practices, this kind of lawsuit goes to Google's key business: collecting, indexing, and presenting links to the world's information in order to sell advertising.

The music label decided to dismiss the case voluntarily on March 24, 2010. The company's lawyers did tell Google, however, that the case would be refiled in the future. On April 15, Google attorneys contacted the label again and asked if they still planned to go forward with the lawsuit. The label was "considering its option on whether it would seek relief against Google," but gave no timeframe for doing so and refused Google's request for a guarantee that it would not sue.

A week later, Google told the label that, unless it "agreed to release its claims against Google, Google was going to seek declaratory relief concerning those claims." That happened last week in a California federal court, where Google asked the judge for a "declaratory judgment that Google does not infringe the copyrights" of the label.

In its filing, Google claims "safe harbor" under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act and says that it "responded expeditiously to [Blues Destiny Records'] DMCA-compliant notifications of claimed infringement by removing, or disabling access to, links leading to webpages allegedly containing material infringing BDR's copyrights."

If Google's account is accurate here, the case sounds far less interesting than BDR made it sound. Under the DMCA, service providers like Google are generally shielded from copyright liability if they remove access to copyrighted material when notified by the rightsholder. But other issues are more complicated; if a search engine links to a blog post that is essentially just a pointer to a RapidShare download, must the search engine remove that link? How far removed must the search engine be?

Blues Destiny Records may have had second thoughts about its decision to go after the search behemoth, but it's got a fight on its hands now. In related news, this week RapidShare triumphed in a German appeals court, which found that its file-hosting service did not need to preemptively filter uploaded material for copyright violations. In its 2009 complaint, Blue Destiny Records had actually pointed to an earlier decision from a lower German court which came to an opposite conclusion in the RapidShare case.

In addition to seeking legal remedies, BDR earlier this year signed up with MiMTiD, which provides "Copyright Infringement Search and Automated DMCA Take Down Notice Submission, Management and Tracking Services."