German Court Rules Rapidshare Is Legal, But Must Adjust Content Policies 73
New submitter loosescrews writes "Online file locker Rapidshare is legal in Germany, but has to adjust its policy regarding infringing content, the Higher Regional Court in Hamburg has ruled. Rapidshare plans to appeal. Rapidshare was sued by the German copyright organization Gema which represents 64.000 copyright holders. After reading the verdict, both parties claim they are victorious."
Re:So they left out the good part (Score:5, Insightful)
Most sites I see rapidshare style linkage on uses anonymizer services to hide the referrer for exactly that reason.
No reason to make the link unclickable these days.
Good idea! (Score:0, Insightful)
Great idea, tell the creators to offer the same deal as Rapidshare so that they can make money too. A workable business plan! (Not a joke at all.) I'm sure they will be delighted to hear of it.
Very insightful of you to spot that. Now go talk to the creators and help them understand how to make money. Unfortunately you'll have more success talking to a brick wall, because they insist on keeping prices so high that they're out of reach, and so they make no money whereas Rapidshare does. It's entirely their choice, and their problem, one of unrealistic expectations.
Re:So they left out the good part (Score:4, Insightful)
So they ban the anonymizer website...
And suddenly 234235623 twitter links go dead. In this context a URL shortener is an anonymizer too, you'll now have a bit.ly referrer not a evilwarezsite.com referrer. I bet Rapidshare would love it if they insisted on that, it'd turn into a PR nightmare for the copyright holders.
Re:Always amazes me (Score:5, Insightful)
> but not the creators?
It is OK for creators to make money off content... if they can. If people are willing to pay. If they are not willing and prefer to produce their copies themselves instead bying them from you, you're SOL and have to change jobs to something wehere people want to pay for what you do. What is NOT ok is to solve the problem simply by making technological advancements and the modern copying infrastructure illegal with the intent to simulate the 50's where nobody had a PC and nobody had his PC connected with billions of other people with a PC. "Now as all of you have those wonderful futuristic tools became real... dont use them, because people will lose jobs."
For your business model (selling copies) to work, you basically have to make people forever stay in the 50's. This is the same as if people in the 16th century made book printing illegal to protect manuscript scribes. You're basically a luddite fighting technological advancement because it obsoletes your business. Do you sincerely think you can win that fight? Before, you could run a business to distribute stuff to people, now they can do it themselves. The distribution problem has now been solved. Your business model is simply gone. Adapt or die, you won't win this.
Re:Always amazes me (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Always amazes me (Score:4, Insightful)
Why is it okay for Rapidshare to make money off copyrighted content but not the creators? As some one that lives off copyrighted content why do they have more rights than I do? I spend years creating the content that they casually hand off to anyone with a computer. My creditors would point out that I'm far from rich yet the owners of Rapidshare make serious money off copyright holders. Take away the profits and the creators will vanish. I couldn't care less about the distributors I'm talking about the creators. As a creator I'll tell you now if you give all the profits to groups like Rapidshare then there will be no new content. They aren't the heroes it's the content creators who have been screwed over by the distributors who paid them $0.10 on the $1 and now the file sharing services that pay zero cents on the dollar!. Support the artists and screw the corporate lackies including Rapidshare!
Seems to me your method of making money is dead. Sitting there and bitching about it will do nothing and legislating will take year and years to lock up the illegal distributions methods while new ones pop up. So wouldn't it be about time to change careers like the majority of the population or embrace the interweb as the ultimate distribution channel and work your way up to success. Mind you, you still need to produce something worth while as like with antiques all of a sudden those rare ones seem to be popping up all over the place because of people using the Internet to connect with each other, No where there were only a few, there a hundreds and technology killed that scarcity.
Here you go http://www.engadget.com/2011/12/22/louis-ck-makes-1-million-in-12-days-proves-that-drm-free-conte/ [engadget.com]