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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.'"
Do you think they'd have paid for the games otherwise, though? That's the rub, where it's hard to tell. I have friends who are "collectors", who have gigabytes upon gigabytes of movies, music and software that they never use. They just have it. There's NO way they'd ever have paid for it, and they aren't using it... so who's harmed?
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