GEMA obtains injunctions against RapidShare

[nano]

for those of you that dont know rapidshare is down

http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/8460.cfm

GEMA, Germany's society for musical performing and mechanical reproduction rights, has obtained temporary injunctions against the operator of poupular data exchange services RapidShare.de and RapidShare.com.

RapidShare.com is said to have used copyrighted works of GEMA members "in an unlawful fashion".

The RapidShare.com & .de services operate in a near identical fashion. They both allow users to upload content on virtual storage space, which therefore makes it publicly available.

GEMA spokesman Hans-Herwig Geyer believes neither site should be permitted to continue operations in their present form, according to Heise Online.

The collecting society is demanding details be revealed by RapidShare's operator of exactly how many copyrighted files of GEMA artists it currently stores without permission. However, according to Geyer, RapidShare has to date claimed it has no knowledge or control of the content uploaded by its users.

The District Court in Cologne, from whom the injunctions were obtained, has made it clear that although it was the users and not the operators that uploaded the content in question to the RapidShare servers, this did not, (at least from a legal point of view), make the operator of RapidShare any less liable for copyright infringements occurred within the context of the services.

Harald Heker, the chairman of the executive board of GEMA, believes the outcome of the court's decisions will have a knock on effect with the way "Web 2.0 services" such as YouTube and MySpace will be dealt with in the future.

Heker believes that such decisions show is that "the mere circumstance of shifting acts of use to users and the purported inability of the operator to control content do not relieve the operator of a service from the copyright liability he/she/it possesses for the content made available for download from the operator's website".

[HeatSeeker]

This from another site.

As of 19 January 2008 16:00 GMT, Rapidshare's servers appear to be offline. There are rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by the authorities after a court order, however, court records do not reveal any issued Rapidshare court order as of yet. Rapidshare technician Steven Gircham has commented on this issue - "There are rumors concerning attacks made on the Rapidshare.com servers. There are also rumors that Rapidshare has been shut down by a court order. These rumors are false. We would like to apologize to our users and inform them that no data has been lost. There have been some hardware issues as a result of high bandwidth and server overload. We are doing our very best to resolve the hardware issues, and users should expect uptime by midnight tonight (GMT)"

[Dave98]

they're just DNS problems as far as I can see

[ShadowVlican]

yea... no wonder i couldn't get my ****** from 4chan...

[Dave98]

it's back up and working now anyway

[Emancipated]

Whoa, I almost paid 1 year subscription. Rapidshare is almost as godly as usenet.

[Smoked]

=.=" we lost demonoid already. not this too, i have some important files uploaded