Rapidshare Gets Fined $34 Million

Rapidshare, the wildly popular file-sharing website that allows users to share files with one another, has been fined $34 million.

The Regional Court in Hamburg, Germany has ruled that the site must begin proactively filtering its content. Music industry outfit GEMA requested that the court ban Rapidshare from making 5,000 tracks from its catalogue available to users. The court agreed and imposed the fine on Rapidshare.

GEMA represents over 60,000 composers, authors and music publishers worldwide, protecting copyrights for them.

Rapidshare was also ordered to delete all of those same tracks from its web servers and to make sure that they aren’t re-uploaded. Previously Rapidshare had been using file hashes to recognize tracks that were already removed after requests from GEMA, to ensure that they weren’t uploaded again. The court decided that this technique was not effective.

“The decision of the Hamburg Regional Court is a milestone in GEMA’s fight against the illegal use of musical works on the Internet,” said Dr. Harald Heker, CEO of GEMA. “We are confident that in this way we will be able to reduce the illegal use of the GEMA repertoire on the Internet to a negligible level,” he added.

Bobby Chang, COO of RapidShare, Switzerland, said:

“We do not consider the court’s decision to be a breakthrough. As other proceedings in similar disputes with GEMA have shown, there is considerable disparity amongst the individual courts in some cases.”

Noting that the courts of appeal “tend to restrict the scope of the decisions made by the lower courts,” Chang said it would make more sense to offer music fans the right products and services at the right price to “open up a new source of income for music-markets on the Internet.”