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Germany's RIAA Sues Rapidshare - YouTube Next?

Posted by Zonk on from the they-are-coming-for-you dept.

Hermel writes "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.'"

8 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. Not exactly the German RIAA. by Jesselnz · · Score: 3, Informative

    From what I understand, the GEMA is funded by individual artists and composers, not major record labels like the RIAA. I wonder how many of their members agree with this lawsuit...

    1. Re:Not exactly the German RIAA. by lelitsch · · Score: 2, Informative

      The Wikipedia article is pretty misleading, but your translation is worse. As stated in the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, the GEMA has about 70,000 paying members (artists, publishers, authors), these paying members decide how the royalties are being distributed. This is German law and very similar to the US: to take part in decisions, you have to be a member of the organization. Try electing a union, HOA or club president without being part of the union, HOA or club.

      Now, of course the most popular ones make the most money. Similar to the US where someone who sells 10 million CDs gets more money from their music than a local band who is happy to sell 5000. What the article actually says is that 10% of the members get 70% of the royalties. M0st probably, 1% will get 50% of the royalties, not because of some grand conspiracy, but because they sell more CDs or books than the rest combined.

  2. Small correction... by Jan+Morgenstern · · Score: 2, Informative

    The GEMA is by no means Germany's RIAA, more like Germany's ASCAP. It's a society that collects licensing fees for distributed and broadcasted music on behalf of the creators (but, as in this case, can also act on its own if it thinks that due fee payments are being evaded). The closest thing to a German RIAA would be the national section of the IFPI.

  3. GEMA != RIAA by mseeger · · Score: 5, Informative
    Hi,

    the GEMA cannot be compared to the RIAA. While the RIAA is mostly an industry organisation, the GEMA is a representation of the artists. Not that it doesn't suffer the same delusions of grandeur the RIAA does, but at least the money paid to the GEMA really ends up in the pocket of the artists. And the fees the GEMA requests are pennys compared to the invoices the RIAA sends out.

    Regards, Martin

  4. Wrong by Morosoph · · Score: 3, Informative
    I thought that the research on this topic was well known. Apparently not.

    So, once again. The state of research on the effects of file-sharing.

    --
    Wikileaks, no DNS
  5. Re:GEMA is not the German equivalent of the RIAA. by Anonymous+McCartneyf · · Score: 3, Informative

    The American Society of Composers, Artists, and Publishers is run by its member composers, artists, and publishers. It looks like GEMA works that way also.
    Broadcast Music Inc. is run by radio execs, which means that ClearChannel likely has a large vote. It's probably as much like ROMS as like ASCAP. Many artist-composers sign up with them anyway, esp. if they are signed to the RIAA when they start publishing.
    A strike by the ASCAP caused radio to found BMI. It appears that in the '40s and '50s, ASCAP wouldn't publish music by artists who couldn't write their compositions down. BMI, as a broadcast music corp., could and did publish that kind of work; since its members could directly promote the music that they were publishing, it got a foothold.
    Cites, though I did do some original research:
    http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/ASCAP
    http://en.wikipedia.com/wiki/Broadcast_Music_Incor porated

    --
    There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
  6. Re:Rapidshare are an obvious target by mochan_s · · Score: 4, Informative
    Webspace is now trivially cheap, and so is bandwidth. If you need to share big binary files, setting up an ftp server or a website is trivial.

    No, it is not. Most users get 30/Kbs upload rates. So, setting up web servers and ftp servers from the internet access is not practical. If you buy a website, it can cost about $200-$300/year for the most basic package.

    The only real market for rapidshare that I can think of is illegal content, and it's no suprise to find so much of it there.

    Do you know long it would take to download a 700MB file from Rapidshare? There is a limitation of 100MB per file and 1 file per 90 minutes. It would take over 10 hours! With bitorrent you can get it in less than 30 minutes. It does not make sense for illegal content at all.

    I used rapidshare to share music projects - since most musicians will try and e-mail everything to you. So exchanging rapidshare links was good and we didn't care if it died a few days later since we could have updated the song anyway.

    To tell you truth, I thought only thing unauthorized that was posted on rapidshare was pr0n clips.

    remotely suprised when 99% of the content is illegally shared content?

    Where did you get that number? Oh yeah, you just made it up.

  7. Re:Well... by 1u3hr · · Score: 2, Informative
    I've been wondering the same thing ever since the original Napster. "What the heck were they thinking? Did these guys really think that they weren't going to get sued into oblivion?"

    Rapidshare, unlike Napster, provides no indexing service. Anyone can upload files, but you have to be told, by the uploader, the URL to download. It's no different, except in scale, from any webspace provider, or for that matter, email service. Also Rapidshare does take down files almost immediately a complaint is received, and people have tested this, they will take down any file complained about without notice or checking what it actually is. So if Rapidshare is made responsible for what people upload to its space, then every webspace provider in the world (or at least, in Germany) is in trouble.