The Regional Court of Hamburg in Germany recently upheld the imposition of fines of over €150,000 against Rapidshare and its principals. The court had imposed the fines for violating the injunction it had issued earlier this year.
The injunction was obtained in February 2010 by Bedford, Freeman and Worth Publishing Group (a subsidiary of Macmillan), Cengage Learning, Elsevier, John Wiley, McGraw-Hill Companies, and Pearson Education. It prohibits Rapidshare from allowing 148 of those publishers' copyright-protected works to be made publicly available in digital form on Rapidshare.com. After obtaining the injunction, the publishers discovered that most of the injunction-protected works continued to be available on Rapidshare.com. As a result, they moved the court to impose the fines.
In upholding the fines, the German court made it clear that Rapidshare must implement effective measures to prevent illegal file sharing of the 148 works. In its initial ruling issuing the injunction, the court had ruled that Rapidshare was required to monitor its site to ensure that the publishers' copyrighted content was not uploaded and that users could not gain unauthorised access to the material.
The court has now concluded that Rapidshare failed to take reasonable examination and control measures. These measures include the utilisation of a word filter, which checks the file name during the uploading of files to the servers of [Rapidshare] with regard to whether the author, the title, the ISBN number of the publisher may be contained in this name. Rapidshare is also required to search the relevant popular external link libraries for links to files with the works in dispute.
According to the publishers, the court's decision will help level the playing field so as to foster true innovation - creative original innovation - by prohibiting business models that are based on copyright theft. The publishers contend that businesses like Rapidshare, which have succeeded by offering a "free-for-all" of pirated works, will now be forced to develop truly innovative ways to attract users.
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