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.'"

Comments

Re:GEMA != RIAA

[hclyff]

The money ends up in the pockets of the copyright and publishing rights holders. Fortunately, in many European nations (including Germany, I think), you cannot sell or give up your copyright right. Large distributing company still keep the big bucks of course, for making your records available in stores, but at least they can't push you to sell rights on your work. The artist is always the copyright owner, no matter what.