Rapidshare fined $34 mil

The German performance organisation GEMA, or Gesellschaft für musikalische Aufführungs- und mechanische Vervielfältigungsrechte (the German equivalent of RIAA) went and got all righteous with popular file-hosting and sharing website Rapidshare. Their lawsuit against Rapidshare was filed quite a while ago, but a Hamburg court ruled yesterday that the website has to cough up about $34 million in damages for their violations of copyright law.

We’ve all used Rapidshare, and we all know that they’ve always hidden behind the logic that illegal activity has nothing to do with them; it is users who upload and share illegal files on the site. And that they occasionally delete the files in question when someone reports it. However, the logic didn’t hold up entirely in court, when GEMA accused Rapidshare of knowing about the illegal files and not doing enough to get rid of them.

As a GEMA spokesperson said, “The judgment states that the hosting service itself is now responsible for making sure that none of the music tracks concerned are distributed via its platform in the future. This means that the copyright holder is no longer required to perform the ongoing and complex checks.”

GEMA has been knocking down Rapidshare’s door for a while now. A Düsseldorf court ruled in 2008 that Rapidshare had to take responsibility for the infringements of copyright law carried out within its service. Rapidshare were kinda defiant, stating that they “will not spy out the files that our clients faithfully upload onto Rapidshare, not now nor in future. We are against upload control and guarantee you that your files are safe with us and will not be opened by anyone else than yourself, unless you distribute the download link.”

The difference between the 2008 ruling and the current one is that Rapidshare weren’t forced to pay GEMA (not that we know of). How  are they gonna wriggle out of this one?

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