Rapidshare Wins Another Copyright Infringement Case

By SaM, ExtraTorrent, May 25, 2010

Rapidshare, a German-based file-hosting service, can celebrate another win, now in the US Court. District Court in California investigated the case brought by Perfect 10, an adult entertainment group. Rapidshare noted in its press release that it was just another company’s failed attempt to discredit the largest worldwide one-click-filehost service, and get its business model proved illegal.

Perfect 10 had brought the case to the court arguing that RapidShare was actually offering its users access to any copyrighted work they needed for a monthly fee. It called this an unfair competition for those providers who work honestly, like Perfect 10, and can’t compete with a website of this nature.

Perfect 10 asked to prohibit RapidShare distribute its pictures – a failed attempt that reminds its fruitless fight against Google two years ago. At the time Perfect 10 had tried to forbid the search engine giant to index the company’s photos posted on illegal sites, because it had made and displayed the thumbnails of the photos in the search results.

Now the court made a decision that RapidShare is just a file-hosting service, and therefore can’t be held liable of copyright violation, but only RapidShare’s users can. Moreover, the court also took an entertainment company to task, as it couldn’t even name any place where the claimed content was located on Rapidshare.

It seems like the idea of RapidShare not promoting any violations on copyright, as opposed to other file-hosting services, is gradually catching on. And it is quite a success for the service that it is also recognized in the US. The Rapidshare’s founder says he’s glad to hear the US court in California emphasized the difference between ordinary unauthorized share-hosts and RapidShare.

It was just several weeks ago, when Rapidshare won another case in Germany. At the time the applicants demanded it to react to the copyright works uploading and remove them right away or not to allow upload them at all, thus preventing users from violating the law. Nevertheless, the judge ruled that it isn’t the service, but the users who make the conscious decision to upload content and make it public, and that is the point the US judge seemed to stick to as well.

So, as you can guess, Rapidshare will get on copyright holders nerves for a while.