RapidShare has announced this week that an appeals court in Germany has ruled in favor of the file sharing site, saying it could not be found liable for distribution of unauthorized files, and that forcing the company to filter all uploads would “produce too many false positives.”
The court ruled in their favor because the company does not make uploaded files publicly available, and the uploaders themselves have control of who sees the links.
In 2008, a different court ruled against the sharing site, saying they were currently not doing enough to combat copyright infringement and that the filter system employed was ineffective.
If that decision had stood, RapidShare would have had to log IP addresses, and “proactively check content before publishing it.”
Adds Christian Schmid, founder of RapidShare: “We are very happy about the judgment. The court has confirmed that RapidShare is not responsible for the contents of files uploaded by its users. The judgment shows that attempts to denounce our business model as illegal will not be successful in the long run. With its 1-click-filehosting model, RapidShare responds to legitimate interests of its users and will continue to do so in the future.”
Result for: filter system
RapidShare has announced this week that an appeals court in Germany has ruled in favor of the file sharing site, saying it could not be found liable for distribution of unauthorized files, and that forcing the company to filter all uploads would “produce too many false positives.”
The court ruled in their favor because the company does not make uploaded files publicly available, and the uploaders themselves have control of who sees the links.
In 2008, a different court ruled against the sharing site, saying they were currently not doing enough to combat copyright infringement and that the filter system employed was ineffective.
If that decision had stood, RapidShare would have had to log IP addresses, and “proactively check content before publishing it.”
Adds Christian Schmid, founder of RapidShare: “We are very happy about the judgment. The court has confirmed that RapidShare is not responsible for the contents of files uploaded by its users. The judgment shows that attempts to denounce our business model as illegal will not be successful in the long run. With its 1-click-filehosting model, RapidShare responds to legitimate interests of its users and will continue to do so in the future.”
Result for: filter system
According to a ruling published yesterday, a court in Hamburg, Germany has ruled that Rapidshare is currently not doing enough to combat copyright infringement and that its filter system is ineffective.
The ruling says Rapidshare must now become more active in finding files that infringe on copyrights, especially after rights holders makes the company aware of them. The new rule is very similar to that of the DMCA here in the States.
Besides taking down infringing content however, the company must also “proactively check content before publishing it” to see if similar files have been posted before and to see if those files infringed content. More strikingly however, Rapidshare has to log IP addresses of “potential infringers.”
Rapidshare currently uses a MD5 Hash checking filter to stop the upload of previously removed material, but the court ruled that that was not sufficient as uploaders would only have to change a couple of bytes in the file in order to circumvent the filter. Archives with passwords are also very hard to check, if not impossible.
