Rapidshare Court Case

In an on-going legal battle with GEMA, Rapidshare received an huge blow when a German court ruled that Rapidshare.Com is not doing enough to stop uploading of copyrighted content on their servers, The court said that the steps taken by Rapidshare using MD5 Hash based content filtering to block previously removed material is not enough and can easily be bypassed changing a few bytes by adding/removing/altering the file contents, the court also said that the company has to "proactively check content before publishing it", according to the court ruling Rapidshare should also log and check IP numbers of potential copyright infringers.

Without a viable business model after removing copyrighted content, Rapidshare might face shutdown as there is no Safe Harbor provision in German copyright laws similar to the DMCA, which protects them from liability as long as they remove the infringing content after being notified with a takedown notice.