A German Court has ordered Rapidshare, popular file hosting service, to start filtering all the uploads on the website that may be infringing copyrights. The written from the court has not been made public so we cannot say if there is some more points to be followed by Rapidshare.
Rapidshare always cooperate with copyright holders and limit copyright infringements. This is the why the most popular file hosting service still exists. We have already seen what happened with the megaupload.
But monitoring all the contents is not an easy task. As the content is uploaded by the users on the website, it is really hard to monitor contents from the millions of users worldwide.
But this German verdict is a contradict an earlier ruling by the highest European court. Last month, an European Court of Justice ruled that hosting sites can’t proactively filter copyrighted content as that would violate the privacy of users and hinder freedom of information.
