This question has always been an issue,” said Fred von Lohmann, a copyright attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. One of the closest cases on point, he said, was in 2007, when the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that Google was not breaching copyrights by hyperlinking to images as part of an image index. In the end, von Lohmann speculated that Scribd would win the filtering argument.