German court slams rapidshare with $34 million fine
Germany, the regional court in hamburg has fined file-hosting service Rapidshare a huge amount of $34 million and has further ordered that rapidshare must now filtering certain content. GEMA a copyright protection association happen to be the ones who brought this case to court. GEMA believes to represent 65,000 composers, authors and publishers across the world.
Therefore, the hamburg court rules that Rapidshare is not allowed to make these all claimed music tracks from GEMA’s collection available on the Internet. They have also been ordered to remove all these tracks immediately from there servers and also to stop users from further uploading it to there servers. Now its a challenge situation for the Rapidshare to comply with this rule by court. Because 90% of such files are Zipped, compressed and password protected.
Rapidshare does run such search algorithms already which search through the ZIP files in order to trace copyright material. But since the quantity is in millions so the company will have to make some quick dicisions to further save itself.
Rapidshare is one of the most popular sites on web today, with an Alexa rank of 14 (huge) and millions of unique visitors per month
This is also not the first time such claims have been made against rapidshare, earlier in January 2008 the lost a smiliar case in german court. For this case, Rapidshare will appeal to higher courts and most likely restrict the scope of the decisions made by the Regional Court in Hamburg