Music Industry Got An Injunction Against Rapidshare in 2007, Site Not Shut Down
Written by enigmax on January 20, 2008In March 2007, a court ruled that Rapidshare could be held responsible for copyright violations committed by users who uploaded copyrighted material to their servers. Now, rumors are circulating that Rapidshare has been shutdown – this does not seem to be the case.
Rapidshare is one of the world’s largest file-hosting sites, with a claimed data storage capability in excess of 4 petabytes and offering at least 110 gigabits of bandwidth.
Almost exactly 1 year ago, P2PBlog reported that the German rights organization GEMA had gained a preliminary injunction against Rapidshare which ordered the company to stop hosting and distributing titles which GEMA represent.
Rapidshare made an appeal – but lost. The court decided that Rapidshare should be forced to monitor all uploads which infringed on GEMA’s copyright – a feat which the company said was impossible.
At the time, GEMA boss Dr. Harald Heker said that the Court’s decision shows that it’s not down to the rights holders to police commercial outfits such as Rapidshare for their copyright works. He went on to say that he felt that the decision would send a major signal to all file-hosting sites where copyright works are used to generate revenue for themselves.
Then in April 2007 it was reported that Rapidshare was fighting back, suing GEMA in response – with the aim of clarifying the legal position for file-hosting sites.
Now, rumors circulating on the web indicate that Rapidshare was shut down. Quite a few sites reported the news but this situation does not appear to be true. Rapidshare’s Wiki page is now closed due to vandalism which is believed to have carried erroneous information which contributed to the confusion.
According to a report, a Rapidshare technician said: “There are rumors concerning attacks made on the Rapidshare.com servers. There are also rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by a court order. These rumors are false. We would like to apologize to our users and inform them that no data has been lost. There have been some hardware issues as a result of high bandwidth and server overload. We are doing our very best to resolve the hardware issues, and users should expect uptime by midnight tonight (GMT)”
There is no doubt that Rapidshare stores millions of files – including lots of music. The operators of Rapidshare claim they have no idea what material they store on their servers and are in no postion (much like a regular ISP) to monitor or police the content. The users upload the content, they say, and as such, it’s out of their control.
However, the injunctions issued by the District Court in Cologne indicate that Rapidshare’s liability for such infringements still exist as they were carried out during the course of Rapidshare’s business. GEMA head, Harald Heker said at the time: “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(s).”
In the meantime, Rapidshare.com and Rapidshare.de continue to operate.
This article has been updated
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42 Responses
am I reading this wrong or is it all OLD news??? – I mean now – like in 2007???
The initial court ruling was in early 2007, then there were appeals, then another lawsuit filed, then injunctions, etc etc.
It’s the JUDISSSHHHHAL system, it takes this long and still no one knows what the law is.
Those judge are just internet illetrates. Now let them decide if all the ISPs should log their users activitys. Which is not rationally realisable.
German ISP are forced to do exactly that. :)
I was wondering how long it would be before they got attacked.
Sorry can you link a source from 2008? All I see is articles from the start of 2007.
Right now this blog entry isn’t making a lot of sense. :(
just another article which checked the dates but not the years, rofl!
but there’s sth fishy about the whole issue:
RS.com NEVER was down! but their 2 NS-Servers were unreachable/down.
a few hours after the whole thing started the first static lists for local dns-resolve came up (I wonder where these came from..)
today they added a 3rd NS-Server (over level-3 –> and I thought that was the carrier that went down..)
I guess we won’t really know if they got attacked, the 2-servers simultanously went down, their carrier really did have problems (they hosted their NS-Servers on a different ISP?? – all other servers were working fine!! [makes sense, doesn't it 4 U?..]),…!?
my guess is that after nearly every side picked it up and with nearly everybody crying out loud – they might get raided in the near time!
(and never forget: their ISP is located in Germany (and in other EU-countries) and they are forced by law to safe YOUR IPs for 6 months, since 08-01-01!!)
@esp Check the links, many of the sources are from the past 2 days:
http://www.techshout.com/internet/2008/19/rapidsharecom-shut-down/
http://openpresswire.com/2008/01/19/1-file-sharing-site-rapidshare-shut-down-by-officials/
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2008/01/19/file-hosting-site-rapidshare-shut-down/
The ISP is supposed to log any connections (IPs), but they are _not_ obligated to log anything else.
So unless rapidshare is logging all connections plus the resources that we’re provided, it has no impact whatsoever.
[quote comment="268042"](and never forget: their ISP is located in Germany (and in other EU-countries) and they are forced by law to safe YOUR IPs for 6 months, since 08-01-01!!)[/quote]Actually they have to since september 1, 2007.
Not that the music industry can do anything with it since copyright infringement still falls under civil law and the saved IPs (and a lot of other data) are only available when criminal law is violated.
[quote comment="268111"][quote comment="268042"](and never forget: their ISP is located in Germany (and in other EU-countries) and they are forced by law to safe YOUR IPs for 6 months, since 08-01-01!!)[/quote]Actually they have to since september 1, 2007.
Not that the music industry can do anything with it since copyright infringement still falls under civil law and the saved IPs (and a lot of other data) are only available when criminal law is violated.[/quote]
well yeah that is exactly the case in GERMANY (and as far as I know the law for logging got effective 08-01-01 and not at the moment it was passed!)
in germany the MAFIAA takes the IP to the DA/SA –> DA/SA gives out the name & address and closes (in most cases) he case –> then MAFIAA files under civil-law against that one!
HONEY PIE!~!!!!!!!!!\
HONEY -PIE!!!!!!!!!!
Data retention is nothing more than Big Brother. The truth is the social’economic power elites NEED filesharing to use as the thin edge of their wedge. If fileshring stopped entirely tomorrow, they would be forced to come up with some ludicrous terror scheme as their pretext.
What really happened to rapidshare (the whole saga):
http://moviescinemacenter.blogspot.com/
Look, I know “wikipedia” is a long and difficult word to write. Nevertheless, could you _please_ at least note the difference between a “wiki”, as a general concept, and the frankly idiotic shorthand that’s come into general use of late?
As it stands, the article links to Wikipedia yet the text makes it appear as though RapidShare had been operating their own wiki, on which a page related to this matter (or the entire wiki system) had been closed due to whatever.
I know you people can write well when you want to. So how about it?
There have been many blogs and wiki pages claiming that Rapidshare was shutdown, and even ones imitating Rapidshare employees and saying that they had to format all their drives due to court orders yet asking users to upload the files again.
These are strictly not true.
Rapidshare is NOT shut down and is not going to be shut down anytime soon. Serveral of their servers were, however, hit by ddos attacks causing them to lose apporximately 50Gbps of internet connectivity. This comprises about 25% of their peak capacity. If you try to download something through Rapidshare at the moment, you will notice that the speeds are much lower than normal (eg I usually get upwards of 900kB/s and today I was only getting 200kB/s). They are currently working to make their servers and connections more robust in order to resist future attacks of this nature.
My initial thought is who is next?
EU usenet severs?
EU video sites like Youtube.co.uk?
EU music streaming/downloading sites like seeqpod.com?
Action does not seem to make Bit Torrent indexing sites anymore vunerable.
However, I don’t think file sharers should put all their eggs into one basket, be that basket bit torrent or usenet.
Other alternatives need to be developed like Dargens, Freenet and TPB new protocol.
Otherwise we may as well call it a day cos they are closing the noose around the older file sharing technologies.
Taking them down one by one.
I am not saying that they are going to succeed but in the war for freedom of expression it pays not to underestimate the current vested interests.
They have an incredible amount to loose so the are going to fight dirty.
I don’t get it. Why would Anyone want to use Rapidshare if they wasn’t force to ?
Why ?
It’s a crappy Paysite :O I rather be without the stuff I came for then sit and wait and filling in all that shitty nonworking captchas over and over again and get fails all the time..
Please someone, explain. :)
To all those saying that this is old news; The part about the injunction was included to add background to this CURRENT story about Rapidshare being down and people jumping to conclusions about it being due to their past legal troubles.
Rapidshare has it’s pros and cons, but the biggest advantage is that there is no centralized database and no search feature. The links have to be passed by word-of-mouth, so the files are only accessible to the people specifically looking for them.
While this isn’t advantageous for mainstream, especially given other limitations, the small and medium demand files are handled quite well.
Rapidshare rocks!!!! I hope these fools lose against it.
[quote comment="268581"]Rapidshare has it’s pros and cons, but the biggest advantage is that there is no centralized database and no search feature. The links have to be passed by word-of-mouth, so the files are only accessible to the people specifically looking for them.
While this isn’t advantageous for mainstream, especially given other limitations, the small and medium demand files are handled quite well.[/quote]
There a search feature for rapidshare avaliable and there lots of sites like avaxsphre.org and forumw.org which have rapidshare links for all s/w,music movies etc so ur statement is wrong!!!!!!!
The “search feature” as you call it are completely separate sites that don’t actually “search” rapidshare’s servers.
The sites merely index and catalog links that have been posted by users. If the links are posted, the sitse won’t have them.
Wow, okay a few typos in my last post. If the links *are not* posted, the sites won’t have them.
Private sites can therefore make rapidshares that are never made public and no one else will know they exist.
Hi, I’m a music Producer. I contacted Rapidshare because someone has put a RS links with copyrighted materials.
Rapidshare anwsered 4 mn after, file was deleted immediatly.
I have been impressed. They do great job. Respect.
(It’s not a joke)
[quote comment="268509"]I don’t get it. Why would Anyone want to use Rapidshare if they wasn’t force to ?
[/quote]
Because people in Germany *are* in some way forced to use filehoster services. Traditional P2P is getting too dangerous here, if you share copyrighted material this way.
By the way, the news at P2P Blog is one year old, it’s from Jan.200*7*, not 200*8*. ;)
Ah, now I see, why the articel was updated – the rumors of a shut-down. Which were simply that: false rumors.
I hope rapidshare loses, there are so many other file hosts. Rapidshare is greedy and their specs really are crappy, let them go back to forum hosting and wretched gaming reviews written in broken english.
I like rapidshare. For about 6 euros per month u can dowload shitload of goodies. I wish I could do this the legal way,without paying more.
rapidshare is crappy only if you deal with the free side of it. pay for it and you get a better service than most other file hosting servers. Pay for it and speeds are ALOT higher, and you can use a download manager with serious ease. Files almost never drop out while downloading unless it’s because of your ISP (remember I’m talking the paid side of it)… and most notable is their pages aren’t crammed with flash advertisements. They do a good job and as much pirated material is on there, it is being used for legit purposes too.. more often than any of the other file hosters at that!
it’s not old news. THe site downtime happened a couple of days ago, and people started crying wolf. That makes it relevant TODAY
[quote comment="268882"]rapidshare is crappy only if you deal with the free side of it. pay for it and you get a better service than most other file hosting servers. Pay for it and speeds are ALOT higher, and you can use a download manager with serious ease. Files almost never drop out while downloading unless it’s because of your ISP (remember I’m talking the paid side of it)… and most notable is their pages aren’t crammed with flash advertisements. They do a good job and as much pirated material is on there, it is being used for legit purposes too.. more often than any of the other file hosters at that![/quote]
I use the free side and get about 400kbs down (my max speed), files never drop and i find it one of the best file hosters…and cuz i can change my IP by simply clicking the icon in the system tray i can dl how much i want :P…
thanks for the little clarification on this, I thought they were being terminated. keep up the good work, and thanks again for the heads up.
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