Rapidshare has announced that it will indeed be appealing a recent German court ruling which has the potential to have the gigantic file hosting site shut down.
Last month the court ruled that Rapidshare must block access to any musical works that are represented by the German music rights group GEMA. The ruling even went as far as to say that the courts can “take measures that might have the risk of making Rapidshare’s service substantially less attractive or even close it down completely.”
A company representative has now said that “Rapidshare wants to clarify the legal situation for hosters”, and will be appealing the ruling. The representative also argued that it would be next to impossible to filter its uploads because users can rename files, split them in pieces, or save them as different formats before uploading. Continuing on, the spokesperson added that not all uploads can be considered illegal or unauthorized as music fans can be using the host to have backups of their own MP3 collection without sharing the links.
GEMA, from the other side of the spectrum, has said that it is in settlement negotiations with Rapidshare but refused to comment on any of the particulars.
We will keep you updated.
Result for: music rights
According to a new survey by the University of Hertfordshire, 14-24 year old iPod owners have on average 842 unauthorized songs on those iPods and download an average of 53 more each month.
The survey polled 1200 participants from that age range and that own iPods and found that nearly 70 percent download unauthorized music on a regular basis. 42 percent of those surveyed also admitted to uploading music to P2P networks.
The survey was commissioned by British Music Rights (BMR) and CEO Fergal Sharkey had this to add. “I was one of those people who went around the back of the bike shed with songs I had taped off the radio the night before. But this totally dwarfs that, and anything we expected,” he added of the results.
BMR has been campaigning to make legal music services more appealing and easy to use while at the same time making piracy less appealing. The group feels the best way to do this is to have ISPs offer unlimited music download services as an additional fee to a standard broadband package.
“The positive message is that 80 per cent of downloaders said they would pay for a legal subscription-based service, and they told us they would be willing to pay more than a few pounds a month,” added Sharkey.
