GEMA obtains injunctions against RapidShare

Posted January 23, 200718 yr

20 January 2007 16:22 by Lethal_B

GEMA obtains injunctions against RapidShare 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 is 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

download from the operator's website".

Featured Replies