(Dieser Artikel ist auch in deutscher Sprache verfügbar)

A Hamburg court in Germany has ruled that the free file-hosting service RapidShare.de is not doing enough to combat piracy, so they should check content for copyright infringement before it is made available on the Internet .

The decision was given in the legal conflict between RapidShare and GEMA, a German copyright collective organisation, that has been going fro some years. RapidShare already has a system in place to check against the uploading of already deleted material. The system is based on a MD5 Hash filter, but it was not considered enough by the court because any file can be changed with just a few bytes in order to bypass the filter.

Not even the fact that the company has six employees working full time to remove infringing content was enough for the court that claimed that RapidShare has to "pro actively check content before publishing it" if there had been similar infringements in the past. They also have the obligation to log the IP addresses of alleged infringers.

The judge also ruled that Rapidshare cannot argue that it is impossible to stay in business if it would have to check every single file: "A business model that doesn't use common methods of prevention cannot claim the protection of the law."

The decision will be impossible to implement in the case of the password protected archives that can't be checked for copyright infringement. Also, the case could have limited effects to the Internet free file-hosting, since RapidShare has its main office in Switzerland and there are other free-hosting services available in almost every corner of the world.

Hamburg decision on RapidShare.de (only in German, 2.07.2008)
http://webhosting-und-recht.de/urteile/Oberlandesgericht-Hamburg-20080...

Court: Rapidshare has to check all uploads for copyright infringement (30.09.3008)
http://www.p2p-blog.com/item-859.html

Rapidshare Loses in Court - Must Proactively Remove Copyrighted Content (1.10.2008)
http://www.zeropaid.com/news/9781/Rapidshare%20Loses%20in%20Court%20-%...

EDRi-gram: RapidShare sues German rights holder association (9.05.2007)
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number5.9/rapidshare-gema