Court: RapidShare doesn't need to filter user uploads | Hacker News Reader

Court: RapidShare doesn't need to filter user uploads

arstechnica.com

36 pointsthere16 comments

That's pretty huge, given that in other European countries linking to copyrighted content has been found to violate the law, rapidshare actually distributes the files themselves.

This is likely not the last shot though, the 'ueberlandesgericht' is not the highest court.

Edit: I've been reading the German response by 'telemedicus' linked in the article, here are the highlights (German native speakers please correct me if I'm wrong, stuff in brackets I've added):

1) rapidshare is neither the party that commits the crime nor a participant

2) rapidshare does not make the data publicly available (you need a downloadlink)

3a) checking the filenames is not applicable because you can choose a filename, on the other hand the risk exists that legitimate data would be refused

3b) a datatype can not be blocked because there is no indication a datatype is tied to the legality of the data

3c) a tie with IP addresses is to be declined because IP addresses are regularly used by multiple people

3d) a manual checking of the lists of links can not be required because there is no business relationship between hoster and the people that host lists of links

from http://www.telemedicus.info/urteile/Internetrecht/Haftung-vo...

I'm especially amazed at '1', that they're not even seen as an accessory is very interesting as a conclusion.

to 1: Rapidshare is considered a provider/service. They cannot be responsible for things done "through" them. Same like ISPs or E-Mail providers. 3 plays into this. RS could not manually check all files and it obviously is not possible to automate it either.

to 3b: part of the claim was that "if a file is of the RAR format, that is a clear hint at being a movie file" which the judges identified as false (sometimes they ARE smart).

to 3c: most germans are on dynamic IPs that change all 24h.

everything seems to be intepreted correctly.

Thanks!

I'm very impressed by the technical smarts of the judges in this case, but I do think that a hash on a file (say a 512 bit hash) in combination with the filename would be good enough to warrant automatic removal, I really wonder if this will hold up in the longer term.

A hash would be worthless. Just rar it again with slightly different options and you have a different hash.

On the rar file yes, but on the file that is packed not. After all the rar compressor is 'lossless'.

Then put the modified rar inside another rar (i.e. nest it). And both rars can be password protected, so RS can't even check the first rar.

Add IllegalFile and RandomData.txt to a password protected rar. The hash is essentially random, you can't check the contents, and the illegal file is easily retrievable if the downloader knows the password.

Password protection (or other cryptography) aside, you can make `hashes' that are similar for similar files. This way if you only added a short RandomData.txt the hashes wouldn't differ too much.

That’s a accurate translation :)

I would add that 2) also refers to the business model of Rapidshare: uploaded files are by default confidential. Only users make downloadlinks public, not Rapidshare. (Is that true, by the way? Is the only way to search Rapidshare to search for published links somewhere on the internet?) Giving the user the option of publishing the downloadlink cannot be prohibited. (I would guess because such a feature can have legitimate uses.)

> Is that true, by the way? Is the only way to search Rapidshare to search for published links somewhere on the internet?

I think it is, google lists some 15,000 files in the 'files' subdirectory of rapidshare ( http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Arapidshare.de ), I can't imagine that's all of them.

The greatest part is that the court thinks distributing illegal content isn't the main part of thier operation therefor they are allowed to continue the service in general. I seriously doubt that more than even 1% of the traffic is legit.

Why do you doubt that?

I run a small filedump ( http://files.ww.com/ ) as a service for the general public and from what I can see by looking at the filenames alone (and contrary to the German court I do think they say something about the content) I'd say well over 90% is legit.

I do have a search facility on there, that's something rapidshare does not have, I think I only got away with that because it's small enough to be under the radar.

For sure there are copyrighted files in there, and I do not allow the 'rar' format (because it was universally used to upload full length movies) but the majority are small files, single images, word documents or cad files, and most people are nice enough to remove the files when they're done with them.

It was built as a convenience to get around email attachment limitations.

edit: >The greatest part is that the court thinks distributing illegal content isn't the main part of thier operation therefor they are allowed to continue the service in general.

Where did you read that?

>It's a huge win for the site, which suffered a major setback in the case before a Düsseldorf court back in 2008.

A huge win for Rapidshare, a loss for website owners, since this implies that the responsibility lies on those who host or publish links to Rapidshare.

I'm not so sure here, if hosting is legal then it seriously undermines the 'linking' theory, after all hosting used to 'trump' linking in the past in terms of 'how bad' it was according to a variety of court decisions.

The whole reason the linking was made illegal in the first place was because the 'hosts' were usually in places where prosecution was tough, rapidshare is a 'sitting duck' and they've just won this case.

edit: it might even be that this makes music lockers in Germany legal!

I think Rapidshare not being responsible for infringement must be contingent on what Rapidshare does to fight it.

Well they have damn good lawyers, since now they don't have to check filenames, check checksums, IP addresses, manually check lists of links (according to your post below) and whatever else.

So what does that leave Rapidshare with? Do they just have to manually check files when a copyright owner submits a complaint with a list of links?

(On a sidenote, I could make a pretty good link finder and make it send complaints automatically, there must be some good money in offering such a service to copyright owners)

> On a sidenote, I could make a pretty good link finder and make it send complaints automatically, there must be some good money in offering such a service to copyright owners

Anybody here probably could, and I'm sure the plaintiffs are aware of that possibility.

Already DMCA takedown requests are generated in an automatic way, but that doesn't change much because another upload is minutes away.

It's a real problem for the copyright fat cats, which is why I don't doubt they'll appeal this to the German national high court.

If they call it quits now I predict a serious increase in German hosting capacity in the near future.

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