The whole file-sharing business is the big target these for entertainment industry and now book publishers with every day bring new reports, and court decisions, of how the business is under attack and being painted as the worst thing to happen on the web since .. well … Napster.
The newest target that has gotten itself hit with what has to be an onerous decision is Swiss-based RapidShare, regardless of the fact that the company has been trying extremely hard to work with all the various rights holders and deal promptly with any copyright infringement claims.
As for the decision that was handed down by the Higher Regional Court in Hamburg it puts RapidShare in the position that it now has to monitor all user uploads in order to ensure that now copyright material is being stored on their servers.
One of the groups celebrating this decision is the German Booksellers Association, even though there has been no written copy of the court’s verdict made public yet.
“Internet sites can no longer avoid their responsibilities, and profit from copyright infringing uploads of anonymous users,” says Alexander Skipis, chief executive of the German Booksellers Association.
via TorrentFreak
However, as with all legal decisions there is always the problem with unintended consequences and in the case of decisions going against file-sharing or file locker sites one has to wonder when the companies behind cloud based file storage are going to start being affected. Companies like Dropbox and efforts like SkyDrive from Microsoft are all basically the same idea which means they could see themselves facing the same types of court battles in the future.
