[jacquesm]

I'm not so sure here, if hosting is legal then it seriously undermines the 'linking' theory, after all hosting used to 'trump' linking in the past in terms of 'how bad' it was according to a variety of court decisions.

The whole reason the linking was made illegal in the first place was because the 'hosts' were usually in places where prosecution was tough, rapidshare is a 'sitting duck' and they've just won this case.

edit: it might even be that this makes music lockers in Germany legal!

[bseo]

I think Rapidshare not being responsible for infringement must be contingent on what Rapidshare does to fight it.

Well they have damn good lawyers, since now they don't have to check filenames, check checksums, IP addresses, manually check lists of links (according to your post below) and whatever else.

So what does that leave Rapidshare with? Do they just have to manually check files when a copyright owner submits a complaint with a list of links?

(On a sidenote, I could make a pretty good link finder and make it send complaints automatically, there must be some good money in offering such a service to copyright owners)

[jacquesm]

> On a sidenote, I could make a pretty good link finder and make it send complaints automatically, there must be some good money in offering such a service to copyright owners

Anybody here probably could, and I'm sure the plaintiffs are aware of that possibility.

Already DMCA takedown requests are generated in an automatic way, but that doesn't change much because another upload is minutes away.

It's a real problem for the copyright fat cats, which is why I don't doubt they'll appeal this to the German national high court.

If they call it quits now I predict a serious increase in German hosting capacity in the near future.