Rapidshare Doesn’t Escape Legal Matters

The site receives another unfavourable verdict

Rapidshare is back in the crosshairs of copyright owners. Another court verdict against the controversial file sharing site has been recently announced by the German music rights association GEMA, p2p-blog reports.

Less than two weeks ago we reported on the site’s attempt to come clean by publishing a privacy policy. Now Rapidshare finds itself in trouble waters again – according to a Hamburg's district court ruling, the site must take down 5000 tracks belonging to the GEMA's catalog.

Earlier this year, Rapidshare quickly built a bad rep for itself when news that the site was handing over users’ data to the music industry first emerged. Then the site started to use a MD-5 hash to identify uploads and block files that it had previously removed. Now, all these measures didn’t seem to satisfy copyright holders anymore.

This latest decision of the court orders the company to proactively investigate uploads for copyright infringement and keep an eye on those users that have already been caught uploading unauthorized content on the site.