If Bing Is Copying Google’s Search Results, Is It Breaking The Law?

I doubt it since Google is fighting this battle in public instead of getting its lawyers involved.

On the other hand: An interesting and possibly relevant legal issue here is how WestLaw's star pagination system was copied by LexisNexis (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westlaw#Legal_disputes)

It would seem that Google's ranking would be similar to WestLaws pagination system and might be protected by copyright.

I don't think ordering of results could be considered copyright, that's more like a method (since Bing presumably still crawls the sites and builds it's own index, with perhaps Google as a ranking factor).

Real world consumer product companies copy what the competition is doing every day (it would be like US Airways putting it's interior designers on a Southwest plane), as long as Microsoft isn't using internal Google spies to steal code or something.

How in the world would they be? Scraping web-content is pretty much Google's entire business model. Is 'slightly' hypocritical for them to even speak out on this in my opinion.