The world's largest and most famous music and movie indexing site, owned by the world's largest and most (in)famous online advertising company, endlessly avoids Vivendi Universal, EMI, Warner Music and Sony Music, and Time-Warner, Fox, Disney, Columbia, Paramount, MGM, lawsuits.

Or does it? We are, of course, talking about Google

"Indexing sites are exactly that," p2pnet said during the summer, going on, "Sites that index. They don't actually host anything. They merely point to where something may be. Or not."

The entertainment cartels may be afraid to tackle Google, but Blues Destiny Records isn't. It's sued not only Google, but also Microsoft for "copyright infringement for allegedly returning results that allow users to find pirated music hosted by the file-sharing service RapidShare," says MediaPost, going on:

"In the lawsuit, brought this week in federal court in the northern district of Florida, Blues Destiny alleges that Google and Microsoft have contributed to infringement of more than two dozen tracks by three artists - Ronny Sessum, Roy Powers and Peter McGraw."

"Blues Destiny also alleges that the German file-sharing service RapidShare has infringed the musicians' copyright."

The complaint was "ambiguously worded in describing whether Google and Microsoft directly link to RapidShare or only indirectly link to sites that link to RapidShare, but my own searches indicated that Google's search results did not take searchers directly to RapidShare," says US university professor Eric Goldman on his Technology & Marketing Law Blog.

So "I believe the information flows are something like this: Uploading user => RapidShare => site linking to RapidShare => search engine => searcher/downloading user, who goes to linking site and then follows the link to RapidShare to complete the allegedly illegal download."

He goes on:

The copyright owner appears to have initially struggled with sending proper 512(c)(3) notices, but it got there (or close enough) eventually. The complaint acknowledges that Microsoft disabled the links after receiving some type of notice. As a result, I'm not sure how Microsoft could be liable if they expeditiously removed the links after receiving the copyright owner's notices. Google apparently has not taken down the links (because I can still find them) after seventeen increasingly exasperated requests from the copyright owner, but Google's delayed response/non-response could be due to the copyright owner's imprecision about whether Google was actually linking directly to infringing RapidShare files or only to websites that had allegedly illegal links on them.

As for RapidShare, I didn't see a registration of agent for 512 service of notice, so they may not be claiming 512(c) protection. Then again, the complaint says they are a German/Swiss operation, so they may be impossible to serve and sue in the US, and RapidShare may not have felt any need to satisfy a US law formality.

"There have been other lawsuits against websites for linking to infringing content, but plaintiffs usually try to avoid suing power players like Google and Microsoft - both well-funded defendants who aren't likely to roll over on this issue," Goldman adds.