File-hosting firms 'responsible for pirated content', German court rules
Summary: Germany's top court has ruled that file-hosting service Rapidshare must strengthen its anti-piracy measures after a pirated copy of the Atari title Alone in the Dark was found on its servers
Germany's federal court of law, the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH), has decided that online file-hosting services are at least partly responsible for the contents of the files on their servers.
The legal wrangling started when Rapidshare deleted a file containing a pirated copy of the Atari game Alone in the Dark after the game company notified it of the copyright breach. Atari Europe decided to take the matter further, and went on to sue Rapidshare in order to force it to improve its anti-piracy measures.
The BGH has now overturned an earlier decision by the Higher Regional Court (Oberlandesgericht, OLG) in Düsseldorf which had found in Rapidshare's favour, after the company argued that it was impossible to check the contents of every file on its servers.
While its lawyers told the BGH that the company only offers file storing and transfer services, the argument failed to convince judge Wolfgang Kirchhoff: "The company is called Rapidshare and not Rapidstore," he said.
In its decision last week (Urt. v. 12.07.2012 - I ZR 18/11) the BGH ruled that file hosting in general is an accepted business model with perfectly legal use cases. However, it added, when a service provider is notified that a copyright violation has taken place, it must ensure by technical means that no further uploads of this kind happen.
Rapidshare must also browse its entire file collection to detect and delete pirated content, the court said. Should the service provider not carry out these measures, it will be liable for damages.
The BGH did leave Rapidshare some breathing room, however, by including a clause that anti-piracy measures must be within reasonable limits. What constitues "reasonable limits" is now up to the OLG Düsseldorf to decide, after the BGH handed the case back to the local court.
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Talkback
Tech companies should stop doing business in Germany
I found a copy! Go here!
Sorry, I have trouble believing that serious money is lost to piracy of this sort.
Just another set of lawyers getting rich
The net effect to the filehosters will be that all uploaded materials will be salted and passworded to the point where no file recognition programs are useful. Front-ends are already appearing to make the process automatic for the end users, and those tools will grow even more sophisticated. Forums and directories will proliferate, offering auto reload and redirect services. The more that the mediazis clamp down, the more innovative the solutions will become to defeat them.
The answer is to change the business model and take advantage of technology, but the media cartels cannot or will not loosen their stranglehold. It's up to the citizens to do it.
And the lawyers just keep getting richer ...
A good decision
In addition to requiring some level of responsibility from those who operate businesses of all kinds, we really need more international co-ordination, so that file-sharing sites and other internet-based businesses in rogue countries without proper law enforcement can, like banks in tax havens, be barred from operating in responsible countries.