Court reverses Rapidshare filesharing verdict

WEB HOST Rapidshare has won an appeal against film distributor Capelight Pictures that absolves it of blame for the dissemination of a film through its network.

Capelight Pictures, known for peddling such motion picture marvels as Cherrybomb, Dood Eind and Fanboy, had accused Rapidshare of not undertaking "all reasonable measures" to stop the spread of a title through its network. Capelight had initially won an injunction against Rapidshare, however the Higher Regional Court of Düsseldorf has reversed that decision.

The latest decision simply confirms an earlier one by the same court, where it was decided that Rapidshare took appropriate measures. Rapidshare had argued that due to English file descriptors, a word filter would not effectively work to remove files on its servers.

The Court had agreed with Rapidshare that should such a filter be used, it would "hinder the lawful saving of private copies". In Germany, people are allowed to store private copies of copyrighted works. Therefore, deletion of private copies could in turn open Rapidshare up to possible litigation.

Rapidshare's CEO Christan Schmid, undoubtedly pleased with the outcome, offered up some stern words. "Copyright holders should therefore think very carefully in future about whether they wouldn't prefer to save themselves some time and above all the expense of suing RapidShare for something for which the company cannot be held liable."

This victory represents a win not just for Rapidshare but for the web hosting industry as a whole, which, like the downloaders themselves, was in the firing line from the Big Media cartels. Web hosts are likely to incur massive costs should they be required to enforce tighter checks on the content that resides on their networks, a cost that would most likely be passed on to end users.

It is likely that those looking to crack down on filesharers will have to take a different route, as hosting companies and filesharers start to turn the tide against faceless corporations that resort to bullying tactics in order to satisfy their greed. µ