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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.'"

2 of 144 comments (clear)

  1. 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

  2. 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.