Rapidshare Filters 148 Book Titles, Loses Lawsuit

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Rapidshare a website that is well-known to offer free unlimited download on movies, music, games, software, and books will now have to filter all file uploads for 148 book titles, mainly academic belonging to six book publishers. Six book publishers, Bedford, Freeman & Worth and Macmillan, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, Pearson and The McGraw-Hill Companies, suppliers of textbooks globally, filed a lawsuit against Rapidshare on February 4, 2010 that further resulted in a preliminary court decision to filter book titles uploaded to Rapidshare starting from February 17.

RapidShare plans to appeal the court’s decision, a spokesperson for the company said in an e-mail to Insidehighered

Copyright law was made for a world of physical goods, where prevention does not interfere with the privacy rights of millions of people,” said the spokesperson. “In the internet age, prevention like preemptive control of uploads naturally leads to the violation of the data privacy of millions of other users, that have not even been suspected of any wrong doing, by monitoring their private communication.”

Basically,” she added, “this boils down to a discussion about how society wants to balance the need for protection of copyright versus the protection of data privacy.

The order issued by a three-judge court reads “copyrighted literary works are unlawfully being made publicly available in the context of a share-hosting system on the Internet.” And Failure to comply with the court’s decision will cost up to $339,000 in fines and even prison time for some of Rapidshare’s management team led by Christian Schmid and Bobby Chang.

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