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

Imbeciles!

[jack2000]

Judges really have no clue of how internet hosting works, do they?

Re:Imbeciles!

[NeutronCowboy]

No, they're applying laws that were written before copying and distribution of intellectual work became an integral part of our lives. If anything, blame idiotic politicians. Once we have laws that make sense, we can move to blaming judges. I'm not holding my breath.

Can we just fix copyright?

[realcoolguy425]

Hell I'd go out of my way to protect everything and anything if there was a reasonable time before it fell into public domain. I keep thinking about this issue a lot, I think the solution needs to involve the copyright owner paying in money, very very small sums for the first few years, but leading to much larger sums as time moves forward. Hopefully until they opt to just let it fall into public domain because they have already made a profit on their works. (Anyone else sick of the current Mickey Mouse copyright laws we have now?)

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.

Re:Can we just fix copyright?

[JustinOpinion]

I'm very much in favor of copyright reform, including shorter terms.

But, while interesting, the "tax copyrights" idea brings in a new set of problems. Like many regulatory systems, it can end up favoring the big players (big business, rich people, etc.) because they are usually best able to game any system you devise (because they have the money and lawyers necessary to "work the system").

The system you describe would restore some balance in the competition between medium and large corporate copyright holders. It is self-correcting: only truly valuable copyrights are maintained, and the rest are freed to the public. But in this system, small players (small businesses, individual creators, struggling artists) are marginalized. For instance the vast majority of amateurs wouldn't bother to (or, really, be able to) register. This means that their creativity would be fair game for massive companies to use as they will. Some content may be so trivial that it doesn't matter. But there is a huge middle ground where the creator won't really be able to pay the fees (because they are not big and powerful enough to monetize it), but it would be grossly unfair to then let big companies monetize the works (even though other big companies could compete by also monetizing it).

There would be innumerable blog posts, essays, photographs, music samples, and so on... that would be unprotected. Again as a copyright reformist I actually think laxer protections are often a good thing. But in the "tax copyright" system the problem is that it becomes asymmetric: the big players can maintain their control but the littler players cannot. The notion of an artist maintaining some measure of artistic integrity, even for a short while, will be gone... unless the artist aggressively monetizes their work so as to pay for the fees (which, in many cases, would result in another kind of "loss of integrity" for the artist).

One can then go back and further tweak the rules (exceptions based on size of work, estimated value, artistic vs. commercial intent, etc.). But adding more and more rules often continues to favor the big players, who have the time to mine the laws for loopholes, argue their cases in court, and lobby for legal tweaks. Meanwhile the little players are left utterly confused by the labyrinthine laws (as is currently the case). My point here is only that these issues are actually quite delicate, and we have to be rather careful with what new system we put in place. Every system will have drawbacks. We need to make sure that the new drawbacks are not worse than the old.

In that vein, I think a more gradual reform is safer. It is also, pragmatically, much more likely to be doable.

But How?

[Voyager529]

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.

Re:Surprised

[Mastadex]

Once you start hitting the Obvious Targets - RapidShare, MegaUpload, etc - the content will be pushed further underground such as Torrent websites. This is the same thing that we saw with ThePirateBay when it was under fire. Mininova and other websites took over as the leading Torrent hubs.

Trying to silence the masses is impossible.

How to filter?

[EvilToiletPaper]

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.

Re:How to filter?

[Rysc]

The accepted way to do this is with JPEG + RAR. rar files with a garbage header are valid, jpegs with garbage at the end are valid. You simply rar your data, make a simple jpeg, cat simple.jpg data.rar > innocent.jpg and then upload.

Re:Surprised

[Mordok-DestroyerOfWo]

What begins with a 'U'? Is it fun? Is it like fishing? Last time I went fishing I was able to get a lot of stuff because I used a net.

Re:Surprised

[Dotren]

I wish I could remember where I read this (maybe one of NYCL's blog posts) but it seems not one court case has been brought regarding illegal downloads via bittorrent. So far, everything has been through the Gnutella and related networks.

For the ISP problem, with most bittorrent clients you can turn on variable levels of encryption. In Vuze (formerly Azureus) for example, you can have no encryption (default) all the way up to making sure you never connect to any peers or seeds that are not also using the same level of encryption.

For that matter, I've wondered lately why encryption isn't turned on by default in most clients after installation. Of course I realize that it may be a performance issue but I've never seen any numbers on the resources used when requiring encryption versus not.

Re:Surprised

[Taagehornet]

Mininova and other websites took over as the leading Torrent hubs.

Just to correct an all too common misunderstanding, Mininova really cannot be compared to The Pirate Bay.

Mininova is nothing more than an index. Mininova does not operate a tracker. The majority (if not all) of the torrent files found at Mininova would be pretty useless if the Pirate Bay servers weren't around to do the heavy lifting.

The torrent network really isn't as decentralized as most people seem to think; torrent traffic would take a major hit if the servers at TPB were shut down ...at least for a while.

Re:Surprised

[Dotren]

HBO monitors torrents and sends cease and desist letters. A buddy of mine has quite a collection of them :)

I haven't dug into this yet but I've been curious.. is it possible to get a list of clients without actually connecting to the tracker and sharing the material yourself? I've never tried to access a tracker directly to see what information you can get from it and I know that every bittorrent client I've tried so far seems to disconnect you from seeds and peers when you "stop" a torrent download. It would be interesting to see what methods the companies use to get the information on torrrents to send out those letters as it is hardly in their interest to share their own content, even in small bits, to discover who is connecting.

With torrents (and similar), the swarm (rather than individual people) are redistributing. There are seeders, obviously, with a share ratio > 1, but many peers will only upload a small portion of the file and may never upload the entire file. Can the RIAA successfully sue someone for redistributing 20% of a song?

Common sense would tell me no, or even if they can, that they'd only be able to sue for a fraction of the song's value. However, we all know this whole thing with the RIAA, MPAA, and copyright has little to do with common sense and the money they are suing for is massive compared to the value of the song anyways.

Re:Surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

*looks at username*
*looks at post*

Bwhahahaha!

Safe deposit boxes

[MobyDisk]

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?

Re:Surprised

[Omestes]

Freedom is the right to say what you want to say and do what you want to do so long as it has *some* ethical justification. Downloading stuff isn't that.

I could probably come up with some ethical justification for anything, no matter how heinous, and I'm sure some large percentage of the population actually believes their ethical justifications for strange things.

I personally have nothing against piracy anymore. I used to have some qualms, but I worked them out. A significant percentage of people still pay, and will continue to pay for crap. Its really hard to say that this ratio will change, since most pirates are young and tech savvy, and piracy is about as easy as it can get (give me 5 minutes, I'll find you a free copy of ANYTHING you want) right now. Distributing media is still VERY profitable, even with piracy.

Until the various industries move into the digitial age, piracy will be around at roughly the same level it is at now. By "move into the digital age" I mean COMPETE with the various mediums that allow piracy. Before we say that it is impossible to compete with free, I'd like to point to services such as Hulu, iTunes, and Amazon, as well as concerts, and self-distribution. How much money did Trent Reznor make off of his various free (in every sense) offering? A ton, buy adding priced options that contains value-added features that can't be pirated. Sure small artists can't do this as well, but, small artists are also the ones who make the least amount of cash from giant labels, and thus are hurt the least by piracy (and probably gain the most, since the name of the game at that size is to grow a fan base).

I owe nothing to record labels. It is not my job to support their business model, or give them money when I don't have to.

Re:Surprised

[Zerth]

Yes, you can. I rewrote a torrent client that neither downloaded nor uploaded data. Just polled the tracker for information on connected users, the same as the various torrent indexes use to gather data on # clients, avg completion, etc.

It also made itself known as a client, so that other users would ask it for pieces, but that was just to gather statistics on how well a torrent spread across the swarm. You could write a client that none of the other clients would know about(ie, never told the tracker "hey, I'm participating", just asked who was participating).

Most anti-"known bad users" features rely on the investigator's client contacting you to see if you are really sharing(not just on the tracker list). If they didn't have to prove you were actually sharing something, they could just snarf the list from the tracker and no-one else would even know.

But then it would be trivial to spoof IPs onto the tracker and they'd be getting in even more trouble for falsely prosecuting little old ladies and printers.

Re:Surprised

[Cross-Threaded]

I want to know why it's not being modded as trolling...