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Rapidshare Ordered To Filter Content
A Cow writes "TorrentFreak reports that the Regional Court in Hamburg, Germany, has ruled that file-hosting service Rapidshare must proactively filter certain content. Music industry outfit GEMA asked the court to ban Rapidshare from making 5,000 tracks from its catalogue available on the Internet."
Reader biabia brings an update to a related case in Italy involving four Google executives. The issue in that situation revolves around Google's response time in taking down a video that was deemed to be a privacy violation. Google is worried that a verdict against them could lead to mandatory pre-screening of all public videos that are uploaded onto their websites. Those proceedings have now been postponed until late September.
Update: 6/24 at 17:45 GMT by SS: The article originally reported that Rapidshare was fined $34 million. No such fine has been imposed — $34 million was the estimated value of the tracks hosted on Rapidshare.
Update: 6/24 at 17:45 GMT by SS: The article originally reported that Rapidshare was fined $34 million. No such fine has been imposed — $34 million was the estimated value of the tracks hosted on Rapidshare.
Here's to the hope that they'll be first against the wall when the revolution comes.
As much as I have come to strongly dislike Rapidshare's glitches (saying something is downloading when it isn't, sometimes up to a day after a download has finished or been disrupterd for example), this is horseshit. Filtering doesn't work anyways.
If you believe in privacy, and believe you have "nothing to hide" at the same time, you're a goddammed idiot
Judges really have no clue of how internet hosting works, do they?
I'm surprised it took this long.
It should be just a matter of months before shit hits the fan with all the other ones.
This is rubbish. Rapidshare is teh best place to leech my 1337 warez. :(
http://torrentfreak.com/court-orders-rapidshare-to-proactively-filter-content-090624/
Anyway, maybe something like years 1-4 $100 years 5-8 $1000 years 8-10 $40000 then we could just say something 1 million per year for every year there after. So either way, the work will benefit the general public (as was the original intention of copyright law). If the work is so wildly successful it will raise money. If the work isn't that great, it gets put into public domain sooner, so it can be built upon. Anyway, maybe I'm crazy, I don't like to see this kind of over-regulation of thought anyway. However if we WERE going to provide the protections that copyright holders want, I would greatly prefer a system based on this.
What is the viable solution to this? If they solely delete known instances of the data in question, they will be uploaded again in no time. If they add a keyword-based filter, then it'll just become like Napster in its dying days where files are intentionally misnamed enough to skirt the filters, or given random names entirely and linked to elsewhere. If they do hashing, uploaders will use RAR/passworded RAR/encrypted RAR archives. It's a cat-and-mouse game that becomes the prime example as to why, in one of the few glimmers of common sense in the DMCA, services like Rapidshare are exempt from getting brought to court for hosting copyrighted content, as long as they take it down if asked by the copyright holder. Hosting the files is the job of Rapidshare. Policing them isn't.
Indeed! The torrent sites have been getting all the flak, but direct download sites seem like the low hanging fruit to go after.
The only reason to pay for their services is to access copyrighted material... that seems like monetizing copyright infringement to me.
I'd like to see Google get caught up in this, because they have more than enough money to defend themselves.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Let the politicians and courts screw up the internet so bad that nothing but flash ads and porn are left, then we can can all use darknets. out of site out of mind.
As long as they keep the ebooks which you really can't find anywhere else...that's the only reason I use Rapidshare. It's a goldmine of history books, some of them out of print but not out of copyright. In any case, via AvaxHome and Filestube it's saved me a lot of trips to the local university libraries.
For a typical rapidshare download, the files are names something weird, fragmented into multiple tars/rars and they're mostly password protected. The user gets all this info from the site that provides the links. The rapidshare servers themselves seem oblivious to the content of the files.
How will rapidshare enforce filtering? crack passwords for every rar, open the content, view it, check it against existing copyright works? I doubt if filtering will deter any illegal file-sharing on rapidshare at all.
Would this be rapidshare.de or rapidshare.com ? They are significantly different.
Unfortunately for GEMA, Rapidshare placed a dog/cat CAPTCHA to access the check. That is, of course, after they've waited out the time delay for free-users.
That beats being fined $80,000 per song like they do over here in the states.
1) Encrypt content in whatever manner seems suitable (TrueCrypt, password protect RAR, etc.)
2) Link to second download on same site, with textfile containing password.
3) ???
4) Profit!
Considering all I have ever managed to download from them is the same damned Rick Astley video.... MAN I hate that song... never gonna gi---
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
For the gain of an industry, not bigger than that of the industry of toilet seats or brushes, Internet utilities and places are forced to do, what is the job of the police and government, and additionally censor things.
Well, luckily, according to their own calculations, the RIAA has only 5-7 years more to live. :)
On another note, I am a bit happy that Rapidshare will be killed. It was a horrible step backward from modern systems like Gnutella. In terms of modernity, Rapidshare was here:
Rapidshare, FTP, alt.binary & Co. -> Napster & Co. -> BitTorrent & Co. -> eDonkey & Co. -> Gnutella, WinMX/NY & Co. -> Darknets & Co.
(Yes. BitTorrent also is a step backwards, because the search function is not inside the application, and you have to download little header files, instead of ed2k/magnet/etc. links, which makes it unnecessarily complicated.)
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
They don't just do this for pirated crap. They actually are used for legal purposes. They don't promote it even near the level the piratebay was. They are beeing agnostic to what is uploaded to their servers. They shouldn't be required to police the data users are uploading because they frankly are no different than an ISP who offers webspace.
Not sure if you're trolling or not, but you realize that when a site like RapidShare goes down, it's users will just move to another hosting-service and "abuse" that one, right? It's not RapidShare's fault, they aren't uploading any material. They can't prevent any illegal material from being uploaded, so they really have no fault in this matter.
For every HTTP-based upload service you take down, you'll get ten in return. You can't prevent this from happening.
I have used rapidshare quite a bit. I liked it because most of the stuff on there was clean. It was easy to download. There is actually a website rapidlibrary or something that you can use to search for stuff on rapidshare and you will not believe the kind of stuff thats on there and by that I mean everything you can think of, someone has uploaded it on rapidshare, especially ebooks, music and movies. I guess this means an end to the free downloading era for me. I am little skeptical about getting stuff off from torrents because of the viruses/malware either on the torrent files or on the sites that hosts these torrents. Anyway, I also know of other sites that will popup, however, usually such sites have lots of annoying flash/porn ads on it.
Here's a new and innovative idea: Why don't you actually pay for the copyrighted material that you wish to use instead of worrying about how you'll skirt the copyright laws.
Once president is set, it will be trivial for GEMA or other *AA organizations to just go after the sites one by one. A new download site comes up? Once the ball starts rolling, it would only be a matter of 30-45 minutes from a download site coming online to being shut down via a call to the ISP and a motion of discovery. Give 2-3 hours for filling out the legal pleadings, and a lawsuit might be filed the same day.
Remember after the Napster win by Lars, the total destruction of AudioGalaxy and many other file sharing applications until they moved their servers offshore. Even then, all it did was get the *AA to focus on suing (and winning) multi-million dollar cases against individuals.
Amazing, this figure means that there are only at most about four hundred illegally uploaded American tracks. That's not even noteworthy. ;-) *hides*
Ezekiel 23:20
Just imagine if we all started mailing each other burned copies of music over the postal system. The RIAA would then demand to open all mail and screen for it. This whole business of screening all content seems to be bordering on unconstitutional to me. If I'm a copyright holder, does that give me the right to root through downloads and uploads on your personal computer for possible violations? It's certainly an interesting gray area for the legal system. On one hand you have the copyright holder's rights and on the other the computer user's rights. Whose rights are more important?
This is why I love Opera Unite! My family is always asking me to 'fix' their computers for them... for free. Yeah, well, now any files I want to share on sites like RapidShare I just put in a hidden folder on their computer and then install Opera Unite as a startup service to run in the background!
:)
Might take a while, but I think once they've had the RIAA raid their house a couple times, they might put it together and stop asking me for computer help.
The President is set already.
I often wonder when governments of small markets (state/providence/prefecture or national) if smaller companies like Rapidshare who aren't competing on the level of MS or Google ever consider simply blocking access to that region that has laws/rulings that challenge the profitability of their business model. As much as it seems anti-thetical for a "world wide web" it seems from a business perspective a real option.
Even more so, how would you do it to satisfy the court... block by IP, geotraceroute, TLD, a message saying "Due to Company vs. State, if you are a resident of region, you are not permitted to use this site.... [legalese]...".
Forgive my spelling from time to time. I'm often posting during short breaks.
>>$34 million was the estimated value of the tracks hosted on Rapidshare.
$1.92million / 24 songs, that's $80,000 per song...
$34million / $80,000 = 425 songs.
I thought rapidshare had a much more diverse collection of music than that.
Music industry outfit GEMA asked the court to ban Rapidshare from making 5,000 tracks from its catalogue available on the Internet.
thank god....when i read the headline i was afraid this might affect my ability to download porn.
on a more serious note, can we please get a court to force restaurants to stop playing '80s music as well?
Darth --
Nil Mortifi, Sine Lucre
If I put a CD into a safe deposit box, and I share the key with people - and they go to the box, copy the CD, then put the CD back... is the bank liable?
$34,000,000 worth of tracks is less than 50 songs.
An SQL query goes to a bar, walks up to a table and asks, "Mind if I join you?"
Why isn't this tagged 4chan?
So they've got a technology to scan inside RAR files with obfuscated names now? If they start putting password lock so you have to have the password to even see the archive content what then? These courts really don't bother consulting actual Internet people, just some lawyer doing intern clerk duty on the way to their own judicial posting who happened to use the Internet a few times to try to score on craigslist. Oh well, good luck enforcing it.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
So they were hosting only 425 tracks. I would have figured they'd had many more than that.
That 34 million is, of course, street value of the goods--after they've been "cut" with powdered sugar and strychnine, to a purity less than 10% of the original.
-I like my women like I like my tea: green-
Finally, someone on Slashdot who is intellectually honest.
Fantastic, well-written post. You speak for many of us.