It's patently ridiculous for the court to suggest that rapidshare is ineligible for safe harbor protections under DMCA because they don't have a "DMCA agent" registered with the copyright office. It's obvious that rapidshare provides reasonable and appropriate information on how to contact their abuse department. It would be one thing if they intentionally obfuscated the process and made it difficult to find this information but it took me all of 3 seconds to find this page: http://rapidshare.com/abuse.html
To be fair the court did not actually rule one way or the other on the DMCA issue, they simply said they felt rapidshare was "unlikely to succeed" in using the safe harbor affirmative defense, but still very worrisome.
As to the issue of "specific knowledge" this too seems like a stretch. Being notified that there "is infringing content on your network" seems much more akin to GENERAL KNOWLEDGE to me, specific knowledge would be more along the lines of LOCATION of the infringing content on your network. In this matter the court seems to contradict itself since they find that rapidshare is not guilty of distribution or direct infringement because they do not know or make available the locations of specific files yet despite this fact finds them to have specific knowledge of infringing activity.
Thankfully the court did NOT find that they were guilty of contributory infringement (of which the specific knowledge of infringement was a pertinent fact) because rapidshare had taken "simple measures" to prevent infringement:
Considering the evidence submitted by the parties thus far, the Court concludes that Plaintiff has not shown that RapidShare is failing to take simple measures to prevent further damage to Plaintiff’s copyrighted works. Rather, the evidence suggests that RapidShare is using information provided by Plaintiff to locate and remove infringing materials, and is also taking independent steps to identify, locate, and remove infringing files. Accordingly, the Court concludes that Plaintiff has not shown that RapidShare is contributorily liable for copyright infringement under the standard announced in Amazon.com,
So if rapidshare had known there were infringing files on their service, even if they did not know the specific locations of those files, and had failed to take any measures they likely WOULD have been found to be guilty of contributory infringement.
Techdirt has not posted any stories submitted by piguy314.
It's patently ridiculous for the court to suggest that rapidshare is ineligible for safe harbor protections under DMCA because they don't have a "DMCA agent" registered with the copyright office. It's obvious that rapidshare provides reasonable and appropriate information on how to contact their abuse department. It would be one thing if they intentionally obfuscated the process and made it difficult to find this information but it took me all of 3 seconds to find this page: http://rapidshare.com/abuse.html
To be fair the court did not actually rule one way or the other on the DMCA issue, they simply said they felt rapidshare was "unlikely to succeed" in using the safe harbor affirmative defense, but still very worrisome.
As to the issue of "specific knowledge" this too seems like a stretch. Being notified that there "is infringing content on your network" seems much more akin to GENERAL KNOWLEDGE to me, specific knowledge would be more along the lines of LOCATION of the infringing content on your network. In this matter the court seems to contradict itself since they find that rapidshare is not guilty of distribution or direct infringement because they do not know or make available the locations of specific files yet despite this fact finds them to have specific knowledge of infringing activity.
Thankfully the court did NOT find that they were guilty of contributory infringement (of which the specific knowledge of infringement was a pertinent fact) because rapidshare had taken "simple measures" to prevent infringement:
Considering the evidence submitted by the parties thus far, the Court concludes that Plaintiff has not shown that RapidShare is failing to take simple measures to prevent further damage to Plaintiff’s copyrighted works. Rather, the evidence suggests that RapidShare is using information provided by Plaintiff to locate and remove infringing materials, and is also taking independent steps to identify, locate, and remove infringing files. Accordingly, the Court concludes that Plaintiff has not shown that RapidShare is contributorily liable for copyright infringement under the standard announced in Amazon.com,
So if rapidshare had known there were infringing files on their service, even if they did not know the specific locations of those files, and had failed to take any measures they likely WOULD have been found to be guilty of contributory infringement.