File-sharing site Rapidshare has been hit with a big fine of €24 million ($34 million) by the Regional Court in Hamburg, Germany, following a request by GEMA, a German copyright protection group acting on behalf of 65,000 composers and other music industry parties. The court also forbid the file-sharing site from hosting any of the 5,000 tracks from GEMA's collection.

Rapidshare will have to delete all of the tracks currently hosted on the site and also prevent them from being uploaded again. The site had been using a hash of the files to prevent them from being re-uploaded, but that technique was deemed insufficient by the court. Obviously, the judge didn't mention what methods the file-sharing site should use and it might prove difficult, to say the least, with files being uploaded as archives, sometimes password-protected.

“The decision of the Hamburg Regional Court is a milestone in GEMA’s fight against the illegal use of musical works on the Internet,” Dr. Harald Heker, chief executive officer of GEMA, said. “We are confident that in this way we will be able to reduce the illegal use of the GEMA repertoire on the Internet to a negligible level.”

Rapidshare is expected to appeal the ruling and is hoping a higher court will restrict its scope. Bobby Chang, the company's COO, downplayed the decision and believed the music companies should offer better online alternatives to Internet users. “We do not consider the court's decision to be a breakthrough. As other proceedings in similar disputes with GEMA have shown, there is considerable disparity amongst the individual courts in some cases,” he added, according to Billboard.biz.

“[W]e think that it would make more sense to work together to provide music fans with the right services at the right price and to open up a new source of income for music-markets on the Internet.”