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German Court Rules Rapidshare Is Legal, But Must Adjust Content Policies

Posted by timothy on from the some-zwiespältigkeit-with-that? dept.

New submitter loosescrews writes "Online file locker Rapidshare is legal in Germany, but has to adjust its policy regarding infringing content, the Higher Regional Court in Hamburg has ruled. Rapidshare plans to appeal. Rapidshare was sued by the German copyright organization Gema which represents 64.000 copyright holders. After reading the verdict, both parties claim they are victorious."

5 of 73 comments (clear)

  1. Always amazes me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Why is it okay for Rapidshare to make money off copyrighted content but not the creators? As some one that lives off copyrighted content why do they have more rights than I do? I spend years creating the content that they casually hand off to anyone with a computer. My creditors would point out that I'm far from rich yet the owners of Rapidshare make serious money off copyright holders. Take away the profits and the creators will vanish. I couldn't care less about the distributors I'm talking about the creators. As a creator I'll tell you now if you give all the profits to groups like Rapidshare then there will be no new content. They aren't the heroes it's the content creators who have been screwed over by the distributors who paid them $0.10 on the $1 and now the file sharing services that pay zero cents on the dollar!. Support the artists and screw the corporate lackies including Rapidshare!

    1. Re:Always amazes me by aix+tom · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Just make your content as easy (or easier ) available than on rapidshare. Note that I said "easier" not "cheaper" or "free" just "easier".

      Sometimes it seems the priority one of the artists (or perhaps the distributors) is to PREVENT people from getting their stuff. Last Month I was looking for some older songs I remembered. No CD available at all, Only an MP3 on amazon.com I tried to buy it, but I wasn't allowed. So I had to spend about an hour tracking it down "some other way", since nobody was willing to offer me a option to actually buy it in a way that would have supported the artist.

      Last week I got shipped 5 Blu-Rays hat I ordered. Only 2 of them worked out of the box, for 2 others I first had to upgrade my players firmware first, the fifth didn't work even then but funny enough I had no problem ripping it and then watching the copy.

      So every time when I have to decide whether to buy or pirate, I have to take into account the amount of work it takes to get the actual purchased copies to even WORK. The only way out of this problem for customers AND content creators in my opinion to cut out the distributor middle-man. It used to be they were the ones who had better technical means to distribute content from the artists to the masses. But now every artist could have way better means to get his content to the masses, and in the end have perhaps $0.90 of $1 left over for himself.

  2. Re:So they left out the good part by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    HTML magic is not really required (I dont think it is possible either). There are websites, whose sole purpose is to forward you to the link passed as a parameter. Pretty much every website uses such an "anoymiser" service. So your website redirects you to the anonymiser website, which inturn redirects you to rapidshare. Now according to rapidshare, the referrer is the anonymiser website, and it cannot know which website really sent you to them.

  3. Re:So they left out the good part by _0xd0ad · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "No shipping browser currently supports this"...

  4. in 2009... by AliasMarlowe · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "No shipping browser currently supports this"...

    Are you sure about that?
    Support for the "noreferrer" option was added to Chromium in 2009.

    --
    Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire