German court rules against Rapidshare
File hosting service Rapidshare has long been distributing copyrighted content. In recent years, Rapidshare has become much more vigilant about protecting copyright, quickly removing content on request of copyright holders. This, however, wasn’t enough for GEMA (German collecting society, responsible for collecting copyright-related fees and distributing the money to the artists), which sued Rapidshare for copyright infringement. The German court has ruled in GEMA’s favor, ordering Rapidshare to pay a 34 million dollar fine to GEMA, and to start actively filtering and removing the files it hosts for copyrighted content.
Official GEMA statement: “The judgment states that the hosting service itself is now responsible for making sure that none of the music tracks concerned are distributed via its platform in the future. This means that the copyright holder is no longer required to perform the ongoing and complex checks.”
Read full article @ Billboard Biz.
German Music Industry To Shut Down RapidShare? @ Mashable
Posted on Wednesday, June 24th, 2009 at 10:45 am.
Diary, Online Article.