No they just tell people what it says. No room for responsibility there, no sir.

You don’t see why anyone would care about a file hosting service being forced to deanonymize thier traffic? What happened to the ‘rah rah, corporate spying is double plus bad!ONEone’ little boy blue that shows up in every NSA thread to insist the true threat is the people the NSA is bullying?

GEMA outsources their job by judicial fiat and you claim the people being grifted are not the ones who now shoulder their obligations but a third party that’s tangentially involved. Stay classy little boy blue.

Why would you even care what some foreign corporation is required to do, unless it affects you by making pirating a bit harder?

Some people want to keep our data overseas and out of the hands of the NSA. If a foreign court can essentially make file lockers such as Rapidshare illegal or force such services to shut down by making the cost to run them too high to make it worthwhile, where does that leave the people who used Rapidshare for storing legal content?

You seem to misunderstand the whole idea behind file lockers. People use file locker services to store and share data. Whether they own the rights to distribute that data should matter to the service provider only if it receives a legitimate takedown notice.

Rapidshare staff members can make educated guesses as to whether content uploaded to its service infringes upon copyrights. They can even set up some form of content-matching (e.g. MD5 hash matching) to prevent people from uploading infringing copies. But they can?t know with 100% certainty that any given data infringes upon someone?s copyright until the copyright holder comes forward (at which point Rapidshare staff can set up content blocks and take down the offending content with 100% certainty).

All of that ties into two separate points:

1.) A service provider cannot know beforehand with absolute certainty whether a specific piece of data uploaded to its service infringes upon an existing copyright. YouTube made that point damn clear when it proved that Viacom had sued YouTube over content that Viacom employees had uploaded. If Viacom couldn?t get its facts together about what content infringed upon its copyrights and what content didn?t, how can we expect YouTube to do the same thing when it has to police millions of hours of videos per day?

2.) A service provider that provides a legal service and advertises itself as a legal service generally shouldn?t bear the responsibility of what its users do with the service. The safe harbor provisions of the CDA make that damn clear. We don?t hold Twitter responsible when some jackass makes bomb threat jokes. We don?t hold Facebook responsible for allowing hatemongers to spread their vile messages. Why should we hold Rapidshare and all of its bastard children to a different standard?