Rapidshare Loses Lawsuit, Will Filter Some Book Titles

A court ruling has issued an injunction against file hosting service Rapidshare. The company will now have to filter all file uploads for 148 book titles, mainly academic belonging to six book publishers. Failure to comply with the court's decision will cost up to $339,000 in fines and even prison time for some of Rapidshare's management team led by Christian Schmid and Bobby Chang.

Six book publishers, Bedford, Freeman & Worth and Macmillan, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, Pearson and The McGraw-Hill Companies, suppliers of textbooks around the world, filed a lawsuit against Internet giant Rapidshare on February 4, 2010, which resulted in a preliminary court decision to filter book titles uploaded to Rapidshare starting with February 17.

Following the release of the decision in the press, a Rapidshare spokesperson said this for the Inside Higher Ed website, "Copyright law was made for a world of physical goods, where prevention does not interfere with the privacy rights of millions of people," adding that "In the internet age, prevention like preemptive control of uploads naturally leads to the violation of the data privacy of millions of other users, that have not even been suspected of any wrong doing, by monitoring their private communication."

Rapidshare's legal office didn't take this laying down and quickly appealed to the court's decision, citing that implementing an upload filter denies the user's data privacy, and the company will be breaking some of its own terms, besides several security and privacy laws.

The file hosting website is currently averaging about 42 million visitors per day (3% of Internet users) and according to a study conducted by Attributor, between July and December of 2009, it was hit with 53,000 takedown notices, about 36% of the total takedowns issued in that period.

The order issued by a three-judge court reads “copyrighted literary works are unlawfully being made publicly available in the context of a share-hosting system on the Internet.” If indeed the decision is kept in place after the appeal and the court's final decision in this case, the ruling will be a cornerstone for future lawsuits and other content filters on Rapidshare.