RapidShare To Be Shutdown?
This post was published 1 year 9 months 10 days ago and its content may not be valid anymore.German based RapidShare seems to have a bit of legal troubles on their hands. German music companies have taken Rapidshare to court and have secured an order to stop its users from downloading infringing music tracks from its servers, or be shut down.
Last week we reported on rumors that Rapidshare had, or was about to be, shut down, rumors that now look likely to resurface. The company, one of the world’s largest ‘one-click’ file hosting services, has lost a copyright infringement case against German performing rights outfit, GEMA. Representing a claimed 60,000 members and more than 1 million rights owners worldwide, GEMA has taken an aggressive stance in pursuing legal action against Rapidshare, trying to force it to be accountable for the infringing actions of its users.
For its part, Rapidshare has always insisted that it cannot be held responsible for these actions, such as when users upload copyright works (in this case, music) to their servers for subsequent downloading by others.
On 23 January 2008, the district court in Düsseldorf (Landgericht) disagreed with this assertion after GEMA succeeded in convincing the court that Rapidshare should take responsibility for infringements carried out within its service.
GEMA are trying to imply that as a result of the decision, Rapidshare will be forced to take preventative action to stop GEMA works from even getting onto their servers, rather than a DMCA-style after-the-fact removal. GEMA says that if Rapidshare are forced to filter they will likely end up with a service that’s not worth operating, so they may decide to shut it down completely.
in essence the users would be shutting down rapid share….. well just the ones who upload files that are under copyright law…… but that’s how it works……. a bunch of users upload illegals to a (supposedly) innocent company to begin with, then a lot of people download, eventually a media company catches on, then said (supposedly) innocent company ends up getting threats from media company…….. and in the end……. everyone loses……… the (supposedly) innocent company loses everything, functionality, speed, users, income, and or et cetera…… the people lose what is (presumably) a good place to store and share files (legitimate or not)…….. the media company loses, well because they can’t stop the pirates and the pirates will just move on to the next place that will take them…….. the pirates lose by, uh, having to look for another site and possibly getting caught for uploading an illegal file…. I guess…….. but hey……. all the rest of the people who don’t use the site, um, they lose a sight that they might have used in the future…….. of course there’s always more……….. always……..if only they could just identify what a file is by its data (because names and extensions can be changed with ease) and prevented encrypted files to be stored on their servers……. if only…… though those would both slow things down…..
this may well be the end of rapidshare.de …
and the beginning of rapidshare.sw / .es / .pt / …
not that this would help rapidshare not to get sued. but the past shows that the courts in other countries will decide differently in these questions.
“and the beginning of rapidshare.sw / .es / .pt / …”
Yea couldn’t they just keep doing that, but change there terms of service every time they get sued?
rapidshare shared accounts:
http://rapidshare.com/files/108192949/Rapidshare_fresh_accounts.zip
please do not change password or i’ll never post again.
i Doubt that it will ever get closed at all , the holders arent responsible for what the users post.
Besides the files are getting deleted after the complains too , so they cant say rapidshare doesnt do anything about it.