Ben Reid
20 Jan 2007 11:22
GEMA, Germany's society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights, has obtained temporary injunctions against the operator of poupular data exchange services RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com.
RapidShare.com is said to have used copyrighted works of GEMA members "in an unlawful fashion".
The RapidShare.com & .de services operate in a near identical fashion. They both allow users to upload content on virtual storage space, which therefore makes it publicly available.
GEMA spokesman Hans-Herwig Geyer believes neither site should be permitted to continue operations in their present form, according to Heise Online.
The collecting society is demanding details be revealed by RapidShare's operator of exactly how many copyrighted files of GEMA artists it currently stores without permission. However, according to Geyer, RapidShare has to date claimed it has no knowledge or control of the content uploaded by its users.
The District Court in Cologne, from whom the injunctions were obtained, has made it clear that although it was the users and not the operators that uploaded the content in question to the RapidShare servers, this did not, (at least from a legal point of view), make the operator of RapidShare any less liable for copyright infringements occurred within the context of the services.
Harald Heker, the chairman of the executive board of GEMA, believes the outcome of the court's decisions will have a knock on effect with the way "Web 2.0 services" such as YouTube and MySpace will be dealt with in the future.
Heker believes that such decisions show is that "the mere circumstance of shifting acts of use to users and the purported inability of the operator to control content do not relieve the operator of a service from the copyright liability he/she/it possesses for the content made available for download from the operator's website".
Source:
Heise Online