Rapidshare Ordered to Check All Uploads for Pirated Content

According to a German court Rapidshare.com’s efforts to prevent online piracy are very insufficient and its filters proved to do a poor job.

This court asked Rapidshare from now on to "proactively check content before publishing it" if there have occurred similar infringements before. Rapidshare was also required to log and check IP numbers of possible offenders.

Although Rapidshare has been deploying a MD5 Hash filter to stop users from uploading previously removed files, and claimed that it keeps six employees working full time to take down pirated content, in the Hamburg court’s view this was hardly enough since pirates find it easy to change a few bytes of a file if they want to evade the filter.

According to the court’s ruling the company cannot argue that respecting the new stipulations would put it out of the business because checking every individual file is costly. "A business model that doesn't use common methods of prevention cannot claim the protection of the law", the authorities declared.