Germany Says P2P Company Must Proactively Monitor Content For Infringement
from the a-little-understanding-please? dept
Another day, another awful legal ruling about file sharing. This time, coming out of Germany. A German court has told file hosting company Rapid Share that it needs to proactively screen and monitor all content hosted on its site and remove any infringing files. The company already uses a hash method to screen out infringing files its been alerted to and employs six people who monitor for infringement, but the court has said that's not enough. Specifically, it notes (correctly) that an uploader need only change a file slightly to avoid the hash filter -- but then somehow makes the leap to suggesting that this becomes Rapid Share's liability. It's yet another case where judges seem to not understand where liability should lie. It should be common sense that liability lies with the user who's doing the actual infringing, rather than the platform provider -- but it seems to get mixed up way too often. Of course, in the grand scheme of things, this will have almost no impact as people will simply migrate to other sites instead.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: copyright, file sharing, germany, liability, monitoring
Companies: rapid share
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This judge
They obviously have no idea of what personal responsibility means. People should be responsible for their own actions. That is why we have something like section 230.
People need to stop blaming others for their own failures or for breaking the law.
Kids blaming GTA, TOO BAD, punish the kid who was too uneducated to know the difference.
Platform providers, innocent, as they are not the ones commiting the crime. Their platforms are meant for legitimate purposes, or at least can be used for legitimate purposes, even if they knew it could be used for other stuff. Car makers still make cars even though crooks use them to evade being caught.
I can say I never intend on visiting Germany with so many horrible recent rulings. None of my tourist money will ever support such stupidity.
*/rant*
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Rapidshare is no angel
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Re: Rapidshare is no angel
Additionally, why is rapidshare responsible? Under the DMCA and grokster and everything, they are not encouraging piracy. There is no inducement. They don't say "hey, please share". Blaming them, as techdirt clearly states, is not the way to go.
This would be like blaming ironpython for the problems with .net. Is it really their fault? Should they be sued for antitrust? I doubt it.
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What give the right to P2P to violate my privacy?
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Re: Privacy?
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quit mincing around and shut it down
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reason why the ruling was what it was
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The judge is within German law
That said it is however wrong to blame the P2P service when he should be going after the uploader's. but then even germany dont have enough jails for tne number of file sharers.
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Re: The judge is within German law
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Re: The judge is within German law
That being said, I have to give Rapidshare credit for making the effort; it sounds as if they were doing the best they could, and the loophole was a genuine oversight rather than simple laziness.
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Re: The judge is within German law
Mike Allen wrote…
It’s not quite the same in the UK. To the best of my knowledge, case law only makes you liable once you are made aware of the problem content. In Godfrey v. Demon Internet Service, Demon got into trouble for not promptly removing posts from their own Usenet server, after receiving the complaint.Although I don’t use RapidShare (I’m too cheap to pay for a service, and the free one is useless), my understanding is that a lot of the content is put up in password protected container files, such as Zip and RAR. Some bright spark suggested that all RapidShare needs to do is ban password protected files. If that became the case, users of the service would simply start using encryption software that didn’t leave any tell-tale signature.
You can hardly restrict the service to strings of bits that RapidShare can interpret; you’re just something like Photobucket at that point. Regardless of who should be liable, unless the court wants to make all general-purpose hosting services illegal, it’s technically unachievable. It makes about as much sense as the decision in the case of Belgian ISP Scarlet, where the only way Scarlet can currently stop being fined is for them to switch off their network.
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No problem!
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RS-vs-PB
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Rapidshare? have fun.
Why do i have to pay 20Dollars in my Cinema, to see a film, with a small popcorn and a coke? That is ridiculous!
Back to the topic, I think it is an infringement of my own privacy, if i go to rapidshare, i think of saving my files, having a backup, just as when today my little daughter tipped melon juice on my laptop.
I'm really happy to have my files backuped there!
And I'm happy to pay the 3 or 4 bucks.
I don't want anyone to see, whats on my computer, not that i do illegal things, i just don't like it. (Why call it Personal Computer then?) That's why i got a password for my account on my Computer!
And Rapidshare is NOT a open page, Rapidshare ensures, that it will keep your data private and I am the only one, who knows the download links. Just if YOU share them with others, you offend the law.
Rapidshare is too big, imagine, how many matches you get when you type in "warez" into the australian google: 80,000,000 (Eighty-Million.) And most of them have more than just one movie uploaded on rapidshare...
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Anyway if they shutdown Rapidshare, MegaUpload would be the next big thing. Cut 1 head off and another 10 heads emerge!
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It’s not P2P!
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"Infringing files"?
"A German court has told file hosting company Rapid Share that it needs to proactively screen and monitor all content hosted on its site and remove any infringing files".
That also means other p2p sites, too, I guess.
That also means they have to remove EVERYTHING!
hehehe
Who would post their last summer's vacation video online for the whole world to see? hehehe
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http://indexoffiles.com
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thanks for the article
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