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29 June 2009 0:19 by Andre "DVDBack23" Yoskowitz
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Last week, the file-hosting giant Rapidshare lost a case to the German copyright society GEMA.
As part of the ruling, Rapidshare was told to "proactively filter" over 5000 tracks from GEMA's catalog and make sure they are not distributed on their servers.
Rapidshare has announced this weekend that they will in fact be appealing the verdict.
GEMA created a software that can search web forums and extract links that infringe on GEMA's copyrights. Rapidshare however, scoffs at the software, claiming it does not work.
"It's questionable whether the application can deal with mechanisms to prevent the scraping of links, open encrypted files, accurately identify audio files or find links in forums that can't be accessed by search engines."
They of course are correct, as the software will not be able to identify mislabeled files, password protected RAR files, and more notably, files posted in private Warez forums.
Rapidshare CEO Bobby Chang also noted that GEMA is following in the footsteps of the RIAA, which will in turn alienate their own fans and customers.
"GEMA is trying to turn back time," he concluded.
Permalink to this article
| Topic: Lawsuits & Legislation
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Related articles:
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Court rules against Rapidshare in Germany (25 June 2009)
German book publishers want Rapidshare blocked (25 April 2009)
Study shows P2P traffic still dominated web in 2008 (26 February 2009)
Fanedit.org facing litigation from MPAA (23 November 2008)
German Court: Rapidshare has to check all uploads for copyright infringement (2 October 2008)
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Rapidshare to fight against German court ruling (16 February 2008)
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| Discuss this article! |
| jony218 (Senior Member) 29 June 2009 1:12 |
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This might be the end to rapidshare as we know it. They got too big and now "the man" has to cut them down to size. Rapidshare was the victim of it's own success. When your the king of the hill, the wrong people will notice you. The pirate bay use to be the king of the hill, but then they got noticed.
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| DXR88 (Senior Member) 29 June 2009 2:01 |
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Originally posted by jony218: This might be the end to rapidshare as we know it. They got too big and now "the man" has to cut them down to size. Rapidshare was the victim of it's own success. When your the king of the hill, the wrong people will notice you. The pirate bay use to be the king of the hill, but then they got noticed.
And The Pirate Bay is still the king.
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| qianzui (Inactive) 29 June 2009 3:43 |
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Just registered to take a look at
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| 5fdpfan (Junior Member) 29 June 2009 11:21 |
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No biggie to me as I never share anything anyhow. And as for downloading stuff from this and other sites like it, it's a pain, Thanks to people posting obscene number of sperate links that you must individually click on and download in order to retrieve an entire file. NO thanks! I'm content to wait for single links or better yet, for the files to appear in a torrent search. So do what you can rapidshare, but if you are unable to beat your leagl wrap, then oh well. Won't be much of a tragedy here.
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| emugamer (Member) 29 June 2009 11:58 |
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Originally posted by 5fdpfan: No biggie to me as I never share anything anyhow. And as for downloading stuff from this and other sites like it, it's a pain, Thanks to people posting obscene number of sperate links that you must individually click on and download in order to retrieve an entire file. NO thanks! I'm content to wait for single links or better yet, for the files to appear in a torrent search. So do what you can rapidshare, but if you are unable to beat your leagl wrap, then oh well. Won't be much of a tragedy here.
There are free tools called download managers. Flashget being one of them. You select all of the links on a page. Hit Ctrl-C and they are all automatically populated for download. There is no reason to individualy download every link one at a time.
The end of RS would be a pretty big hit. There are too many services out there. Netload, hotfile, megaupload, megashares, etc...the list goes on. Even with all of these alternatives, RS has the largest user base, really making it easy to obtain anything (if something is hosted by one person on megashares, you can bet the ranch that there are numerous other mirrors on RS - but it doesn't work the other way). It would be interesting to see who surfaces as the next big hoster, but it will take some time after the dust settles. People on warez will be scrambling to only one of the alternatives, as it's pretty ridiculous to have multiple subscriptions.
I have an RS subscription, but it primarily serves as a means to store my own data that I share with members on other forums. And I share personal files with friends and family from time to time. I hope that RS at least stays alive for that purpose alone. Unfortunately, if the majority of people subscribing to their service share warez, they stand to lose a huge portion of their user base and sales, and I doubt they will survive with whoever stays on.
This message has been edited since posting. Last time this message was edited on 29 June 2009 11:59
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| 5fdpfan (Junior Member) 29 June 2009 13:15 |
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Thanks for those suggestions.
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