Germany's RIAA Sues Rapidshare - YouTube Next?

Hermel writes "The GEMA (Germany's RIAA) obtained a temporary injunction against 'one-click-hoster' Rapidshare.com. If their lawsuit is successful, the GEMA intends to use it as a beachhead against their next targets, including Youtube and MySpace. From the article: 'According to GEMA, the service ... has at times boasted of making some 15 million files available to its users. The operator had however failed to obtain from GEMA a license for making copyright protected files available ... Through its injunctions the District Court in Cologne had now made it clear to the company that the fact that it was the users and not the operator of the services that uploaded the content onto the sites did not, from a legal point of view, lessen the operator's liability for copyright infringements that occurred within the context of the services, the spokesman added.'"

Re:Hmmmm...

[nelk]

GEMA=Nazis... just like the RIAA...

Except that it's Germany's version of Nazis.

Re:Germany's RIAA!?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn skippy. In fact, it's a lot more than just 'possible.' America actually owns all German IP. Surprised you hadn't heard about that. Overshadowed by the late President Roosevelt, Truman was actually a ruthless negotiator, especially when it came to IP. Only he had the foresight to correctly gage the value of future German residuals with respect to the 1980's prodigy known as David Hasselhoff. Stalin didn't give two hoots about copyright etc... and went in a different direction, IIRC.

Re:New business model

[Anonymous Coward]

>1) Create crappy copyrighted material
>2) Upload my crappy copyrighted material to every website that allows anonymous posting
>3) Sue every website uploaded to
>4) ???
>5) Profit!

fixed