Chinese search giant Baidu this week scored a legal victory when a U.S. judge dismissed a lawsuit filed by pro-democracy activists who claimed the company illegally blocks political speech.

A handful of New York writers and video producers accused Baidu of developing search engine algorithms that block U.S. users from viewing content that advocates democracy in China.

According to the court(Opens in a new window), the plaintiffs’ articles, videos, audio, and other publications appear in Google and Bing results, but not Baidu—the third-largest search engine in the world, and the largest in China.

Citing civil rights violations (eight of them, to be exact), the group sued, asking for $16 million in damages. But there efforts were rebuffed.

“Allowing plaintiffs to sue Baidu for what are in essence editorial judgments about which political ideas to promote would run afoul of the First Amendment,” Judge Jesse Furman wrote in his final order.

The question of whether search engine results are covered by the First Amendment has been the topic of vigorous debate, but only twice inside of a court room. To date, both cases have found that results are indeed protected.

“The central purpose of a search engine is to retrieve relevant information from the vast universe of data on the Internet and to organize it in a way that would be most helpful to the searcher,” Furman said.

In doing so, search engines will inevitably have to decide what kind of information to include in its results, and how and where to display it—on the first page, or the last?

Putting years of scholarly discussion aside, Furman made the final decision in favor of the Chinese company.

“Whether or not the First Amendment shields all search engines from lawsuits based on the content of their search results, it plainly shields Baidu from [the plaintiffs’] claims in this lawsuit,” he concluded.