Court: Rapidshare has to check all uploads for copyright infringement
A German court has ruled that Rapidshare.com isn't doing enough to combat piracy and that its filters are ineffective. The court decision of the Hamburg district court, which was published a few days ago, states that Rapidshare has to become active against copyright infringements as soon as rights holders make the companny aware of them - a rule that is somewhat similar to the DMCA in the United States.
However, Rapidshare has to do a lot more than just take down infringing content. The company also has to "proactively check content before publishing it" if there have been similar infringements in the past. Rapidshare has to log and check IP numbers of potential infringers as well, according to the court decision.
Rapidshare has been using a MD5 Hash filter to prevent the upload of previously removed material, and it told the court that it it has six employees working full time to remove infringing content. The Hamburg court however ruled that this was not sufficient because infringers would only have to change a few bytes of a file in order to circumvent the filter.
Th court also ruled that Rapidshare cannot argue that it is impossible to stay in business if it would have to check every single file. "A business model that doesn't use common methods of prevention cannot claim the protection of the law", the decision reads.
If Rapidshare quits, U2start is also in big trouble since all our videos and all our bootlegs are online at Rapidshare (a few dozen bootlegs are already on Mediafire, but that's not enough). Therefore, we ask you this:
- If you have a high speed connection (or live in a country where Mediafire upload is fast), you can help us by uploading bootlegs which still aren't available on Mediafire to Mediafire.
- There is a chance that all bootlegs will be inavailable in a matter of time, reuploading can be done, but even we don't have all available bootlegs and sources on our PCs. If you like a complete collection, try downloading the sources and things you don't have so you can help reuploading if the time is there.
Let's hope Rapidshare will continue the way it does, but it doesn't look good.
