The online copyright do not look to be ending anytime soon, with German file locker pioneer Rapidshare being ordered by a higher regional court in the country to start pro-actively filter copyrighted content being uploaded to their servers. This decision upholds the decisions handed down by lower courts, but Rapidshare may take their appeal further to try and put the onus back on the copyright industries to police their own businesses.
In a decision that appears to go against the European Court of Justice ruling in the Netlog case, the German court has placed the onus of scanning material for copyrighted content on Rapidshare which hosts the files, as opposed to the music and film industries that own the copyright. Privacy groups are already concerned that such scanning will invade the privacy of Rapidshare’s legal users in order to catch those the are infringing on copyright. They have also not stated how Rapidshare is supposed to know what content is and what is not legal to be shared – something only the copyright industries could know. YouTube currently scans all uploads for video scenes and music uploaded to its data bank by the copyright holders (sometimes mistakenly), but even there plenty of copyrighted content appears on the site daily – and it is much more difficult to scan the files when they are compressed and encrypted as RAR or ZIP files.
This looks to be another battle won by the copyright industries after the MegaUpload fiasco in January, but whilst they may be winning cases in the US and Germany, the file lockers based in Russia and China will be far more difficult to shut down. Rather than sue these companies offering legitimate services into oblivion, the copyright holders should be working on their own content scanning technology which they can provide for free to these companies. It would be much harder for file lockers and streaming sites to defend not scanning files for copyrighted content, if such a service was available for no fee. But imposing huge expenses on them for protecting a different sector’s business will only hinder progress in countries where such legal cases prevail – handing the technological edge to countries with less strict laws on the subject.
Rapidshare already removes files reported as infringing copyright from it servers, and has limited the anonymous(ish) free uploads, that are so abused by copyright infringers, to only being downloaded at a maximum of 30kb/s. Rapidshare are one of the file locker services like MediaFire which genuinely seem to be trying to work with the copyright industries (unlike MegaUpload and others) – it is about time those industries embraced their olive branch of co-operation.