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Digital Legal
RapidShare fined over filter failures
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 6 December 2010
File distribution service RapidShare is fast becoming the new pariah figure of the content industries, especially in Germany where various lawsuits have been filed against the Swiss-based tech company. Content owners argue that file-sharers increasingly used RapidShare (or something similar) to illegally share music, movie and other files, and that the tech firm does not do enough to stop its service being used for such copyright infringing purposes.
Different German courts have seemed to rule slightly differently when presented with RapidShare cases, though legal types might argue that specifics of each case explain the inconsistencies. Sometimes things go in the tech firm’s favour, though back in February when a group of book publishers sued, the Regional Court Of Hamburg ordered RapidShare to put in place filters that would stop users illegally sharing 148 specific text books published by the claimants.
And last week those publishers were back in court to argue that RapidShare had failed to comply with that court order. And the court agreed with them, throwing a 150,000 euro fine in the tech company’s general direction.
The extent of RapidShare’s obligations to filter out copyright content has been of much debate, but the court said last week that the company had “culpably failed to take reasonable examination and control measures. These measures include the utilisation of a word filter, which checks the file name during the uploading of files to the servers of [RapidShare] with regard to whether the author, the title, the ISBN number of the publisher may be contained in this name”.
