Rapidshare is one of the world's largest file-hosting sites with millions of files stored on its servers. Rapidshare is a one click hosting provides paid and free services, owned by German and running from Switzerland. The Regional Court of Hamburg has ruled in favor of German collecting society GEMA, which had requested that the court issue an order prohibiting file-hosting service rapidshare.com from making around 5,000 music tracks available on the Internet. [ Read more ]
The Regional court orders Rapidshare to pay a 34 million dollar fine to GEMA, and to start actively filtering and removing the files it hosts for copyrighted content. Initally the case was brought on by copyright protection association GEMA. The court also mentions the precautions allegedly taken by rapidshare and other file hosting website is not sufficient to prevent copyright issues.
"The judgment states that the hosting service itself is now responsible for making sure that none of the music tracks concerned are distributed via its platform in the future. This means that the copyright holder is no longer required to perform the ongoing and complex checks," mentioned in GEMA declaration.
Bobby Chang, COO of RapidShare AG in Cham (Switzerland), is quite certian about this judgement and completely overthrown to higher courts and most likely restrict the judegement made at Regional Court Hamburg. He also explains We do not consider the court’s decision to be a breakthrough. As other proceedings in similar disputes with GEMA have shown, there is considerable disparity amongst the individual courts in some cases. Our experience is that the courts of appeal tend to restrict the scope of the decisions made by the lower courts. For this reason, we think that it would make more sense to work together to provide music fans with the right services at the right price and to open up a new source of income for music-markets on the Internet,”
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