Last week, the file-hosting giant Rapidshare lost a case to the German copyright society GEMA.
As part of the ruling, Rapidshare was told to “proactively filter” over 5000 tracks from GEMA’s catalog and make sure they are not distributed on their servers.
Rapidshare has announced this weekend that they will in fact be appealing the verdict.
GEMA created a software that can search web forums and extract links that infringe on GEMA’s copyrights. Rapidshare however, scoffs at the software, claiming it does not work.
“It’s questionable whether the application can deal with mechanisms to prevent the scraping of links, open encrypted files, accurately identify audio files or find links in forums that can’t be accessed by search engines.”
They of course are correct, as the software will not be able to identify mislabeled files, password protected RAR files, and more notably, files posted in private Warez forums.
Rapidshare CEO Bobby Chang also noted that GEMA is following in the footsteps of the RIAA, which will in turn alienate their own fans and customers.
“GEMA is trying to turn back time,” he concluded.
Result for: warez forums
The IFPI (International Federation of the Phonographic Industry) has announced that they have successfully raided two servers in Hungary that were home to the very popular music release group RAGEMP3.
The announcement also said that the raid disrupted another music release group, XXL. The raid was a joint action by the IFPI, Hungarian police, and ProArt (the local copyright traffic police).
No arrests have been made and the announcement said nothing about any long term consequences for the release groups. Most likely the organizations are nowhere near decimated and its possible that the servers were not the only ones used by the groups.
The release groups, otherwise known as top sites, are “the top tier hierarchy of the online distribution world.” It is where releases begin and the point from which information “trickles” down to torrent sites, newsgroups, Warez forums and finally P2P.
