The site has been declared legal in Germany by the court

Mar 28, 2012 11:43 GMT  ·  By

Last week, the German rights management group GEMA, trumpeted a major victory against RapidShare, claiming that a court decision ordered the site to monitor all uploads for copyright infringing content. That was before the court decision was made public in full.

Now that the entire document is here, surprising no one, the truth seems to be a little (completely) different than what GEMA would like it to be, in the sense that RapidShare does not have to filter uploads or even pro-actively take measures against infringing content.

In fact, the court actually declared RapidShare to be legal in the country, a first for the site. The precedent means that any further lawsuit will have to work hard to prove that RapidShare is "dedicated to infringement" or something of the sort.

"For the first time the Hamburg Higher Regional Court has followed our line of argument on key points and has conferred legal legitimacy on our service, just as other courts have done over a considerable period of time. This is a significant result for us," RapidShare CEO Alexandra Zwingli said.

But it gets even better for the Swiss company, as the court added that RapidShare is not required by law to monitor uploads and check for infringing content, which would have been a massive burden not to mention very prone to errors.

The court did ask RapidShare to make sure that files that have been deemed infringing become unavailable on third-party sites.

There is some ambiguity about this on whether this means removing all links that point to an infringing file that may have been uploaded by different users, or just the links pointed out by those whose content is being shared illegally.

RapidShare claims that it already does that but, nonetheless, objects to the fact that the court is ordering it to do it. As such, it will be appealing the decision, taking the lawsuit all the way up to the Supreme Court.