German court rules: Filehosters like Rapidshare are responsible for copyright violations...
 

Sorry, german only, Google translate is your friend:

http://www.spiegel.de/netzwelt/netzp...-a-844148.html

Interesting comment from the judge though when Rapidshare claimed they cant know if a user didnt just store the file as backup:

"It's called "Rapidshare" not "Rapidstore" - that says it all."

:winkwink:

Shazam!!!

Great quote by the judge. And yes, that does say it all.

Precisely and the day DMCA makes a distinction between storing and publishing clearer, piracy will decline to a skeleton.

cool the judge knows his shit well :thumbsup

Now to take down all the Google piracy groups.

Wow cool judges you have over there :thumbsup

Great judge.

True, Germany knows the things they are doing.

Lol, thats great! :thumbsup

..but then, they may just start renaming the services to avoid the "share" part. :disgust

As someone in the online industry, we should ALL be very adamant about protecting Safe Harbor laws that keep webmasters safe against UGC.

I know we all want to rid the net of as much piracy as possible. But if you start knocking down Safe Harbor laws that protect us against UGC. Then we're all fucked (Even comments on blogs would be in danger of putting the webmaster in jail because a user could copy>paste copyrighted text into a comment field).

So, with that in mind. How exactly did the courts rule? Is there still Safe Harbor protection against UGC. Or did Germany just become one of the worst countries in the world to own a website?

they ruled specifially about Rapidshare and that they must implement filter to prevent the upload and sharing of copyrighted content from non-copyright owners.

Wow! That's definitely quote of the year :thumbsup

"What If Senarios" are complete bullshit because :
What if the world blew the fuck up in two minutes, then nothing would matter right?

:1orglaugh


Reasonable people know the difference between copying part of something for commentary
and distributing material solely to give it away for free. One of the aforementioned processes is copyright infringement and the other is call "fair use".

Plain and simple : Uploading something that is accessible to anyone on the internet is
publishing and distributing it. Those are rights of the copyright holder and the only exception is under fair use for educational, commentary and news reporting.
Uploading a "complete work" is almost always going to be a violation except under
very narrow cases of "fair use".

People want shit for free and they will simply convince themselves of why it's right just
like any crook justifies his actions in his mind.

If any of the pro file sharing arguments had validity then years ago we would have seen
"pirate" TV stations poping up all over the place that showed content from ABC, NBC and CBS. But we never saw that because the air waves were easier to police than the internet.

Awesome quote by the judge :thumbsup

And:
Fucking spot on. "what if" merchants do my nut in.

Does the article say when they're going to shut down rapidshare?

they are not going to do that - they sentenced Rapidshare to make "reasonable" efforts to prevent copyright violations

Currently, rapidshare is probably in a pretty good mood and their biggest competition just got busted.

Well that's some "sentence" indeed...

So lets not bother with laws about copyright. :upsidedow

Because the world will stop if we can't copy and paste other peoples work.

Where is gideon to tell us the judge is an idiot.
Finally some sanity.

I'll go for the "broken record" award with this one..

What they should do is make each user check a box which states that they have the right to distribute the content they're about to upload. Make sure they know the date/time/IP is tracked as well as username/account ID.


I can understand why sites don't want to have to put their submitters under the gun, but it's them or you according to the German court anyway.

:2 cents:

I don't always agree with you, but when I do, as in this case, I agree with EVERY word you say.

Logic has no place in the piracy games. Get that shit out of here.

to be more precise after reading it again:

once a DMCA has been filed for a certain file, the same file must be prevented from being uploaded again

also Rapidshare must monitor websites where sharing links are posted and if they find links to Rapidshare with copryright violations, they must remove those links proactively

Sounds like it's pretty much in line with what PayPal now wants :thumbsup

Summary of the rapidshare case court decision in English:

http://germanitlaw.com/?p=683

The entire world is copy and paste - even our infamous Prime Minister copy and pasted his masters thesis but remains in power and usurping the Constitution. We all need a wakeup call

good summary, correctly translated

This will make their business a little harder and more expensive. Also how does it effect DMCA laws?

it does not, read the english summary above

I see now. :(