RapidShare Gets 150,000 Euro Copyright Infringement Fine

[mr ploppy]

http://torrentfreak.com/rapidshare-g...t-fine-101201/

Back story:
http://torrentfreak.com/rapidshare-o...titles-100224/

"RapidShare ... is also required to search the relevant popular external link libraries for links to files with the works in dispute.”

That will keep them busy then. But why just Rapidshare and not any of the other cyberlockers?

[Lemurion]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

http://torrentfreak.com/rapidshare-g...t-fine-101201/

Back story:
http://torrentfreak.com/rapidshare-o...titles-100224/

"RapidShare ... is also required to search the relevant popular external link libraries for links to files with the works in dispute.”

That will keep them busy then. But why just Rapidshare and not any of the other cyberlockers?

Probably because they're the big name in cyberlockers, especially as "rapidshare links," has become the generic term for any sort of cyberlocker address.

[AdamV]

no wonder why Rapidshare didn't follow the directive for filtering filenames... they would need a significant work to accomplish that and it would be the easiest filtering to bypass by the customers...

and i think RS makes more than 150k each day...

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by AdamV

no wonder why Rapidshare didn't follow the directive for filtering filenames... they would need a significant work to accomplish that and it would be the easiest filtering to bypass by the customers...

and i think RS makes more than 150k each day...

I think people using random filenames was the reason for RS having to also monitor external link sites. Presumably they would give the real name of the book even if the filename was qwerty.zip. It's basically expecting RS to do the publisher's own job of tracking down unauthorised downloads.

[Krystian Galaj]

Wow...
Good precedent for making producers of kitchen knives monitor all the customers they sell the knives to.

[Richey79]

Nice article on the hypocrisy of this move, when media publishers know full well how effective these channels are as a way of publicising their products:

http://torrentfreak.com/emi-promotes...dshare-101204/

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by Richey79

Nice article on the hypocrisy of this move, when media publishers know full well how effective these channels are as a way of publicising their products:

http://torrentfreak.com/emi-promotes...dshare-101204/

I don't really see the hypocrisy. I can give money away and am not being hypocritical if I object to someone stealing money from me.

Was RS fined for infringing, or fined for not obeying the court's order?

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

I don't really see the hypocrisy. I can give money away and am not being hypocritical if I object to someone stealing money from me.

Was RS fined for infringing, or fined for not obeying the court's order?

Not obeying a court order that was impossible to obey.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by mr ploppy

Not obeying a court order that was impossible to obey.

Why was it impossible to obey? If the publishers were able to show that RS didn't comply with the injunction simply by searching RS's site, RS could have easily done so as well.

[HarryT]

Never having used Rapidshare, do they not warn users not to upload material that they don't have the rights to? Is the issue that some of their users are ignoring this warning?

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

Why was it impossible to obey? If the publishers were able to show that RS didn't comply with the injunction simply by searching RS's site, RS could have easily done so as well.

People don't always name their files in an obvious way, so harry-potter-pirate-books.zip could just as easily be called afdsafsa.zip or even afdsafsa.jpg with the real contents being listed on another site. Hence the extra requirement for Rapidshare to monitor the entire internet looking for forbidden content that links to files they host.

[mr ploppy]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Never having used Rapidshare, do they not warn users not to upload material that they don't have the rights to? Is the issue that some of their users are ignoring this warning?

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

[HarryT]

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

[Krystian Galaj]

Originally Posted by HarryT

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

They aren't doing enough, that's for sure.

Youtube has a very successful automated system for checking if parts of the videos uploaded aren't under copyright, and removing them withing minutes. It's very well described here: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/201...-fair-use.html

People are already using Vimeo instead.

Rapidshare could put together a big database of prohibited files, based on files' content's hashes, shared with the rest of hundred big sharing sites, and work on extending it, making sure that once a file is recognized as illegal, it's removed from all those sites, and never allowed to be published there again.

There are problems with this approach.

The users are required to agree to site's terms that the material they're uploading isn't illegal. If rapidshare started to screen it independently, it would mean agreeing that they should care about it, that they're no longer only providing a service, that they feel somehow responsible for the breaking of the law. It's as if Mobileread started big scale automated checks on the books it stores, instead of believing the uploaders they made sure those are legal materials.

Also, unlike on Youbtube of Mobileread, files uploaded to Rapidshare are just data streams. They don't have to be in any usable form. They can be (and usually are) encrypted with long passwords, which it's unfeasible to try to break, and the files names are carefully chosen to have nothing to do with the content (many pirated movies are named 'MyPhotos', for example). The surest way of finding such illegal links is to search Google and filesharing sites they way users do to find the content, then using the passwords found to decrypt the file and confirm this is illegal. Currently rapidhsare refuses to do this for all files, and with good reason - the number of files is gigantic, they wouldn't be able to keep afloat if they had to do it.

So let's assume the big database is extended with files reported by copyright owners as breaking the copyright. As long as this process is not made efficient, and files can stay on RS for months before being removed as illegal, nothing will change. If copyright owners somehow made this process efficient, and files would be removed within hours of their upload, people would stop using rapidshare, and wither switch to other filesharing sites, or go back to using P2P networks, now much more secure than just a few years ago. Rapidshare would go out of business.

I believe they will be paying fines until those fines are bigger than their income - then they will go out of business, rather than doing anything to prevent illegal file sharing. I don't see any other choice for them.

[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by Krystian Galaj

They aren't doing enough, that's for sure.

Youtube has a very successful automated system for checking if parts of the videos uploaded aren't under copyright, and removing them within minutes.

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