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.

Comments

Re:Imbeciles!

[cliffski]

"copying and distribution of intellectual work became an integral part of our lives"

That would be YOUR lives. Not the majority of people.
You DO realise that YOUR life is only possible because other people are paying for movies, music and software to get made?

If everyone acted like the slashdot crowd, you really would be all legal, because you would only have linux distros to torrent. Someone has to make all this stuff, and they have to pay rent and buy food.