RapidShare sued by German RIAA

As of yesterday - check this out:

"The GEMA (Germany's RIAA) obtained a temporary injunction against 'one-click-hoster' Rapidshare.com. If their lawsuit is successful, the GEMA intends to use it as a beachhead against their next targets, including Youtube and MySpace. From the article: 'According to GEMA, the service ... has at times boasted of making some 15 million files available to its users. The operator had however failed to obtain from GEMA a license for making copyright protected files available ... Through its injunctions the District Court in Cologne had now made it clear to the company that the fact that it was the users and not the operator of the services that uploaded the content onto the sites did not, from a legal point of view, lessen the operator's liability for copyright infringements that occurred within the context of the services, the spokesman added.'"

OUCH!

Full article from heise online:

GEMA obtains injunctions against data exchange services

The German collecting society GEMA has obtained from the District Court in Cologne temporary injunctions against the operator of the data exchange services www.rapidshare.de and www.rapidshare.com. The latter is said to have used copyright protected works of GEMA members in an unlawful fashion. The services make virtual storage space available into which users can upload content that is thereby made publicly available to other users. GEMA spokesman Hans-Herwig Geyer told heise online that the services should not be allowed to continue to operate in their present form. The collecting society is now demanding that the operator provide details on how many copyright protected works of GEMA members are currently stored on the said sites.

According to GEMA, the service www.rapidshare.de in particular has at times boasted of making some 15 million files available to its users. The operator had however failed to obtain from GEMA a license for making copyright protected files available, the collecting society spokesman observed. To date RapidShare had claimed not to have any knowledge of the content uploaded by the users and of not being in a position to control the same, the spokesman continued. Through its injunctions the District Court in Cologne had now however made it clear to the company that the fact that it was the users and not the operator of the services that uploaded the content onto the sites did not, from a legal point of view, lessen the operator’s liability for copyright infringements that occurred within the context of the services, the spokesman added.

Harald Heker, the chairman of the executive board of GEMA, believes the court's decisions will have repercussions on the way "Web 2.0 services" such as YouTube and MySpace will be treated in future. What the decisions according to Mr. Heker show is that "the mere circumstance of shifting acts of use to users and the purported inability of the operator to control content do not relieve the operator of a service from the copyright liability he/she/it possesses for the content made available for download from the operator's website(s)." (Robert W. Smith) / (anw/c't)

Damn Them To Hell!!!!

jesus christ njohnson747's avatar nearly caused me to seizure...

jesus christ njohnson747's avatar nearly caused me to seizure...

BUHAHAHAHA!!!!:lol:

So they want to shut down YouTube and MySpace, et al, with this lawsuit if it all keeps pushing according to plan?

Guess we'll need to call Mr. Gore, we need the intarwebs turned off for good.

i havent heard about this until now. guess it looks like we are gonna need to find one of the other 1 million one-click webhosts to use...:boohoo:

That's the problem. Once RapidShare finally goes down (it has not as of tonight) then millions of people around the world will be scrambling independantly to find an alternative. The true beauty of RapidShare is that it has MARKETshare. It absolutely dominates the file sharing scene online. My guess is that 90% of all the links I see are RapidShare. It will take months - maybe a year for another hosting service to emerge from the pack of pretenders. Meanwhile they will all be targeted with the same bullet that brings down RapidShare. Damn.

This reminds me a bit of the end of Napster. I think something less centralized (and therefore harder to shut down) is the best bet for the future. Like BitTorrrent for example. It's more complicated to use (in my opinion) but it's also harder to kill because it doen't rely on a centralized database. That's my next move.

fuck sake just payed out for an account .. think i'm safe....?

They might as well be farting with with a walkman on.

fuck sake just payed out for an account .. think i'm safe....?

You are safe - but your investment may not be in terms of what you get back. I expect the plug to be pulled any day now for both sites.

The only people who have incurred any sort of risk are those people who have uploaded copyrighted material that infringes on the members of the German RIAA. If you uploaded some German music or movies then you might, MIGHT be scrutinized. But RapidShare has made it clear that there is no transparency for them in terms of what they can "see" on their own server(s) and that is their key point in this legal matter. RapidShare is basically pleading ignorance...and we all know just how far that gets you in any court of law.

I knew the jig was almost up when RapidShare.com was started up late last year under a different company name and RapidShare.de was closed to all further uploads at the exact same time. It was a dodge move by the site owners who must have made a fortune from subscriptions in the past 2 years or so.

There's nothing wrong with "sharing", right?