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Rapidshare Ordered To Filter Content

Posted by Soulskill on from the hope-you-like-busywork dept.

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.

8 of 161 comments (clear)

  1. Imbeciles! by jack2000 · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:Imbeciles! by NeutronCowboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
  2. Can we just fix copyright? by realcoolguy425 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    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.

  3. But How? by Voyager529 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Surprised by Mastadex · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    --
    A morning without coffee is like something without something else.
  5. How to filter? by EvilToiletPaper · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. Re:Surprised by Dotren · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:Surprised by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    *looks at username*
    *looks at post*

    Bwhahahaha!