CyberLaw Blog

Archive for the ‘Rapidshare’ Category

(Via TorrentFreak.)

Three Arrested As Police Swoop on Rapidshare Link Forum: “

With 30,000 members Filmowisko was a prominent file-sharing forum. The site didn’t host any illicit material, but like many of its type, linked to movies, TV shows, music and other warez stored on hosting sites such as Rapidshare.

‘Forum administrators are not responsible for content written by users. The files placed here by users are only for promotional purposes. After 24 hours you must delete all files downloaded from this forum,’ said the disclaimer on the front page of the site before it disappeared.

Polish police and the Foundation for the Protection of Audiovisual Creativity (FOTA) anti-piracy group clearly didn’t think the disclaimer counted for much, and on February 12th conducted raids against the site’s operators.

During the raid last Friday, police say they arrested three individuals on suspicion of running the site – a 21 year-old computer science student and two teenagers aged 16 and 17 – and also conducted searches on site members in three other locations.

Equipment was seized including 6 computers and 150 DVDs and CDs which allegedly contained copyright infringing content.

After lengthy questioning the 21 and 17 year-olds were released and now face copyright infringement charges which carry a maximum 5 year prison sentence in Poland. The 16 year-old, who was reported yesterday as still being detained, will be dealt with by the family courts.

The police, who are still to officially confirm the name of the site, say that ‘streaming movies’ were also available via the forum and that those arrested benefited financially from operating the site as they collected revenue from advertising.

They add that the collected evidence is being examined by experts in order to assess the level of damages suffered by the creators of the films and music whose work was linked to by the site.

Anti-piracy group FOTA, which awards the police with ‘Golden Plate’ accolades for carrying out piracy crackdowns on their behalf, will undoubtedly be pleased with this result.

Article from: TorrentFreak, check out our new blog at FreakBits.

Filesharing laws to hit websites and newsgroups too: “

Mandelson to ‘future-proof’ P2P restrictions

The government is planning to award itself powers to change copyright law almost at will, in expectation that new anti-peer-to-peer laws will drive infringement to other services such as Rapidshare and newsgroups.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

(Via TorrentFreak.)

Rapidshare Shares Uploader Info with Rights Holders

Like many new releases, Metallica’s latest album ‘Death Magnetic’ was uploaded to the popular file hosting service Rapidshare one day prior to its official release date last year. Since users don’t broadcast their IP-address or distribute files to the public directly though Rapidshare, it came as a surprise when the police raided the house of an uploader a few weeks ago.

At first it was unclear how the identity of the uploader was revealed, but today German news outlet Gulli said it had found out that this was likely to be accomplished by creative use of paragraph 101 of German copyright law. It turns out that several record labels are using this to take legal action against those who share music on Rapidshare.

Previously the paragraph was only used by rights holders to get the personal details of those who share copyrighted works on file-sharing networks. It basically enables the copyright holders to get ‘permission’ from a civil judge to ask ISPs to disclose the personal details of a user behind a certain IP. Now, however, this also seems to be the case for file-hosting services such as Rapidshare, which is based in Germany.

This of course opens up the possibility for rights holders to go after a wide range of file-hosting services and potentially even BitTorrent sites. Indeed, everyone who now uploads a torrent file to a site hosted in Germany is at risk of having his personal details revealed. Although it will be impossible to prove that the uploader actually seeded the file it might be seen as assisting in copyright infringement.

Pretty much all torrent sites keep track of the IP-addresses of their (.torrent) uploaders, and if the rights holders can get the IP-address of people who upload to file-hosting services such as Rapidshare, they can easily extend this to BitTorrent sites hosted in Germany. A dream come true for copyright holders, but a nightmare for the privacy of Internet users.

Too bad for Metallica’s Lars Ulrich who only just started sharing files himself.