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By George Norman - Software News Editor

Added on 26 Jun 2009(757 Views)

RapidShare, the service that allows you to upload and share files via the internet, has been ordered by the Regional Court in Hamburg, Germany, to proactively filter certain content. The court order came after GEMA, who claims to represent more than 60,000 composers, authors and music publishers all over the world, said that 5,000 music tracks from GEMA’s collection have been made available for download via RapidShare. Consequently RapidShare must forbid access to these files – which the court estimated are worth $34 million.

What does this mean for RapidShare and its users? First of all RapidShare will have to take down all of the 5,000 music tracks that have been uploaded. Then it will have to block users from re-uploading these files in the future. In the past, RapidShare used a file hashes to recognize tracks that were removed at GEMA’s request, but the Regional Court in Hamburg deemed this technique ineffective.


“The decision of the Hamburg Regional Court is a milestone in GEMA’s fight against the illegal use of musical works on the Internet. We are confident that in this way we will be able to reduce the illegal use of the GEMA repertoire on the Internet to a negligible level, commented CEO of GEMA, Dr. Harald Heker.

RapidShare COO, Bobby Chang, also provided a comment on the matter: “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.”

The thing is that RapidShare has always been quite popular with users that want to share copyrighted software, music and movies. The court may have ordered RapidShare to delete and filter certain content, but as Donwload Squad’s Brad Linder reports, it is quite easy to bypass these filtering measures. “It's pretty difficult to filter content on a site like RapidShare, where users can easily ZIP files, change file names, or make other small changes to trick any filtering software that's put in place,” says Linder.

In related news, The Pirate Bay plans to sue Sweden for violation of Human Rights following the ruling that judge Tomas Norström was not biased (details here).





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Tags: GEMA, RapidShare

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