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Germany's RIAA Sues Rapidshare - YouTube Next?
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.'"
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...
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
So, once again. The state of research on the effects of file-sharing.
Wikileaks, no DNS
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.r porated
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_Inco
There is a fine line between recklessness and courage... -- Paul McCartney
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.
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.
Where did you get that number? Oh yeah, you just made it up.