RapidShare Gets 150,000 Euro Copyright Infringement Fine

[HarryT]

Originally Posted by murraypaul

And yet they have full copies of pretty much any song ever released.
So it doesn't seem to be working very well.

I believe that's done with the permission of the record companies. It's essentially a form of advertising.

[Richey79]

Agreed, what Youtube really scan for is tracks being used to accompany footage that the record company wouldn't want associated with their music, either because of the video's content or quality.

Rapid-share go through the motions of warning uploaders to obey copy-right, but they're quite aware that their service wouldn't make any money/be the size it is without being known as a host of illegal material.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Perhaps publishers feel that they aren't doing enough to crack down on illegal uses of the service?

Other than removing content when the publishers tell them about it I don't really see what they can do. It doesn't seem feasible to me to expect them to monitor the entire internet looking for potential copyright violations.

[HarryT]

Perhaps they should consider setting up a facility whereby anyone can report illegal material. Similar to our "Report Post" system, and the system that eBay has for reporting dodgy auctions.

[sourcejedi]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Yes, and the publishers are seeing them as a cash cow because of that.

I think they'd just like them to stop it. (Without being concerned about how. If the only way to stop it happening is to cease operation, they'd be quite happy - and it'd be a strong discouragement to any equivalent service).

I'm puzzled though, 'cos Ars had a very similar story this year, where the court rejected all of these filtering measures as either pointless or over-broad.

Sounds like they're expected to set up a Google Alert and take down anything that people publicly link to as belonging to one of these publishers. I'd think that would work quite well actually... and I'd have thought 150k would cover the labour costs.

[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Perhaps they should consider setting up a facility whereby anyone can report illegal material. Similar to our "Report Post" system, and the system that eBay has for reporting dodgy auctions.

How would this system prevent removing material that is not illegal by people wanting it gone against the wishes of uploader?

[Richey79]

Their system is changing quite rapidly at the moment.

They used to give rewards to those who uploaded massive amounts of popular data (guess which kind of files were popular?):


(not my account - I don't have one and never did)

But they've stopped that since the court judgements against them.

I believe that people tend to upload files with names that give no indication of what is in the files, then index them on another website, to get around the issue of copyrighted files being taken down. Some files use passwords too, so that it would be very hard for anyone to expect RS to check what was in them.

Ultimately, they were making considerable amounts of money out of other people's content, since they motivated power-users to upload stuff with the prizes, and then you could effectively only download larger files by paying for an account with them.

This system is effectively gone now, and we're in the process of seeing RS losing a large proportion of their users. Why go to the trouble of providing the content (even if it wasn't yours in the first place) if you no longer get any reward for doing so?

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Perhaps they should consider setting up a facility whereby anyone can report illegal material. Similar to our "Report Post" system, and the system that eBay has for reporting dodgy auctions.

I'm pretty sure there used to be something like that, but I might be getting mixed up with one of the other similar sites. They have an email us link on each file page, presumably you could use that instead. I still think it should be up to the copyright (with)holder to report them though.