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| Supreme Court: RapidShare Liable For Copyright Infringement – Sometimes Posted: 14 Jul 2012 04:27 AM PDT
Of course, RapidShare didn’t put it there – its users did – but can the company be held liable when its customers commit copyright infringement via its service? One company that believes so is video games outfit Atari. They brought a case against RapidShare in 2008 after illicit copies of its (dire) videogame Alone in the Dark were found on the Swiss-based file-hoster’s servers. Although RapidShare deleted the files in question, Atari wanted more action including a filter and other measures to ensure further user uploads were blocked. Initially the District Court upheld the complaint, but on appeal the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf sided with RapidShare and dismissed the action. The Court acknowledged that the company already takes sufficient measures against copyright infringement and ruled that a filtering requirement wouldn’t be imposed. Atari, however, weren’t prepared to concede defeat and this week the German Federal Supreme Court (BGH) announced its ruling on the case. The Court found that RapidShare could not be held liable for direct infringement but could in some circumstances be held liable for secondary infringement. The Court said that generally file-hosters don’t have to monitor user uploads, but could be required to take action once they have been advised of a specific problem with infringement, i.e Atari’s report to RapidShare of Alone in the Dark piracy. As we know, RapidShare did indeed take speedy action by deleting the infringing files, but the big question is should they have to go further than that to stay within the law? According to the Federal Court, RapidShare has to take all “technically and economically reasonable precautions” (without compromising its business model) to ensure that its users do not upload Atari’s game. The Court also noted that by not installing a word filter RapidShare may have already breached the “reasonable” threshold. One of the additional steps that the Court said RapidShare must take is to monitor a “manageable number” of third-party sites that offer “link collections” of content available on RapidShare. Should it find them indexing a copy of Atari’s game available on RapidShare it should then delete it from its servers. However, as revealed in our earlier interview with RapidShare, the company explained that it had already “..developed a crawling technology that is constantly watching Internet forums, message boards and warez blogs for information about copyright infringement taking place on our system.” Nevertheless, this week the Federal Court said it didn’t have enough information at its disposal to decide if such a process would reasonable for RapidShare to carry out, so it sent the case back to the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf – the court that previously ruled in RapidShare’s favor. "RapidShare remains confident that the German courts will recognize our vigilance in curbing copyright abuse,” RapidShare attorney Daniel Raimer told TorrentFreak. “We're doing more than any provider in the industry to police our site and third-party sites to ensure that legitimate intellectual property rights are protected and that wrongdoers are denied access to our services. Yesterday's decision was a temporary setback. We remain confident that the Higher Regional Court Dusseldorf will ultimately rule in our favor as it has in the past." Source: Supreme Court: RapidShare Liable For Copyright Infringement – Sometimes |
| US “Six Strikes” Anti-Piracy Scheme Will Roll Out Gradually Posted: 13 Jul 2012 10:38 AM PDT
The parties agreed on a system through which copyright infringers are warned that their behavior is unacceptable. After five or six warnings ISPs may then take a variety of repressive measures, including temporary disconnections. When the deal was first announced in July last year the first ISPs were expected to send out the initial warnings before the end of 2011. But this deadline passed silently, as did the July 2012 date subsequently mentioned in the press. TorrentFreak contacted CCI for an update, and the group ensured us that they’re working hard to get things up and running as soon as possible. “With regards to timing, CCI is rigorously working towards implementing the Copyright Alert System in a way that is consistent with the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) and with the needs of subscribers,” a spokesperson told us. The CCI now hopes that the first ISPs will begin sending warnings later this year. However, the group also made it clear that providers will roll out the alert system at their own pace. “We expect our implementation to begin later this year, with each of the ISPs launching at potentially overlapping but different times. We do not intend to launch until we are confident that the program is consumer friendly and able to be implemented in a manner consistent with all of the goals of the MOU.” Exactly why the roll-out has been delayed remains unanswered, but such a massive delay suggests that not everything went as planned. Another question we’ve asked numerous times – which company will be hired to track BitTorrent users – also remains unanswered. All we got back was a comment that CCI is not ready to announce who will “evaluate” the identification technologies. “At this time, CCI is not ready to announce the experts we will use to evaluate the methodologies used by the content owners and ISPs to identify alleged piracy and deliver notices to the right consumers,” the CCI spokesperson told TorrentFreak. The above suggests that the company that does the tracking might not be made public at all. This might be a deliberate choice to prevent protest actions, but it certainly doesn’t add to the transparency of the scheme. Meanwhile, TorrentFreak is getting reports from VPN providers who have seen a significant uptick in new subscribers from the US. Presumably, a large percentage of these new subscribers are signing in anticipation of the “six strikes” scheme. Although the measures that will be imposed by Internet providers are not that scary, there is a worrying backdoor built into the deal which allows the MPAA and RIAA to request personal details of repeat infringers for legal action. Source: US "Six Strikes" Anti-Piracy Scheme Will Roll Out Gradually |
In common with many – if not all – public file-hosting services in existence today, RapidShare has some illicit content on its servers.
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